Financial Controls Assessment

Most fraud in volunteer organizations is not sophisticated. It is one trusted person with access nobody ever questioned, in a role nobody else understood, over a period of years.

It usually is not malice at the start, either. It is a float that never got counted, a reimbursement that never got a receipt, an account only one person can see. The controls were never deliberately removed. They were never built, because the organization grew out of a kitchen table and nobody stopped to redraw the lines.

This assessment finds those gaps and tells you plainly which ones matter.

What I look at

• Cash handling — gate takings, concession floats, tournament weekends, 50/50 draws, and every other place cash enters your organization without a paper trail
• Signing authority — who can move money, who approves it, and whether those are the same person in practice even when the bylaws say otherwise
• Reconciliation — what gets reconciled, by whom, how often, and who reviews it afterward
• Segregation of duties — the single biggest structural weakness in volunteer organizations, and the hardest one to fix when you only have four people willing to help
• Registration and e-transfer flows — online money moves faster than your oversight does
• Grant and fundraising funds — restricted money carries obligations that general revenue does not, and mixing them is a common and expensive mistake
• Board oversight — what the board actually sees each month versus what it would need to see to catch a problem early

What you get

A written report that ranks every finding by severity, so you are not handed forty things to fix with no idea which ones matter. Each finding comes with a specific, concrete fix — not "strengthen oversight," but the actual change to make and who should make it.

With it: a 90-day remediation plan sequenced so the cheap high-impact changes happen first, and the policy templates you need to implement them — signing authority, expense and reimbursement, cash handling, conflict of interest.

If it is useful, I will present the findings to your board directly. Boards absorb this material far better from a person in the room than from a document in an inbox.

How it works

1. A conversation. An hour, to understand the organization, its size, its structure, and what prompted the call.
2. Document review. Bylaws, policies, recent financial statements, bank and registration setup. Remote, on your schedule.
3. Interviews. Short conversations with your treasurer, president, and anyone who handles money. These are not interrogations, and I am careful about that.
4. Report and walkthrough. Written findings, then a session to go through them.

If your treasurer has just left

There is a smaller, more urgent version of this work. When a treasurer resigns — often abruptly, often mid-season — the immediate problem is not controls. It is that nobody else knows where anything is, what is owed, or how to get into the account.

Treasurer Transition — from $2,250, three to four weeks. A documented handover of every account, login, signing authority and recurring obligation, a filing calendar so nothing lapses, onboarding for whoever is taking over, and a light controls baseline while I am in there.

If you are in that situation, start here rather than with the full assessment. The assessment will still be worth doing later, and it will be cheaper once the records are in order.

What this is not

This is not an audit or a review engagement. Those are assurance services, and they are restricted to CPAs holding a public practice licence. I am a Certified Professional Bookkeeper, and what I offer is a consulting assessment of your controls and processes — no opinion on your financial statements, and no substitute for an audit if your bylaws or a funder require one.

If your situation calls for an audit, I will tell you, and I will help you get ready for it.

If you believe a fraud is currently in progress, an assessment is the wrong first call. Speak to your insurer and a lawyer before you speak to me.