Outsourced accounting can bring many benefits to your organization – one of them being a cost-effective solution to manage your accounting processes with the right software. Not only do accounting outsourcing specialists leverage robust software to help meet your overall accounting objectives and streamline processes, but in many cases, they also tie in additional software capabilities extending beyond that. They can also help you understand and use your software efficiently to help you detect fraud and avoid costly setbacks.Doeren Mayhew’s dedicated outsourced accounting specialists recommend these key features to use within your accounting software to help detect and prevent fraud.

Follow Transaction Audit Trails

Create audit trails capturing user activities to help identify unauthorized charges. Your audit trail should include:

• Transaction date
• User’s name
• Type of change

Administrators can apply filters to audit log data to help evaluate what’s happening and determine whether further analysis is required.

Perform Financial Data Trend Detection

Some software can generate accounts receivable and accounts payable aging reports to identify unusual balances. Creating periodic and ad-hoc financial statements can help uncover sudden changes or irregularities in revenue, expenses and cash flow. Unexplained anomalies can foreshadow asset misappropriation and financial misstatement schemes. By outsourcing your accounting, financial data trend detection can be performed by skilled professionals who can appropriately analyze trends and notify appropriate teams of any suspicious activity.

Implement Exception Reporting

Exception reports can be used to flag transactions deviating from established patterns or thresholds. Customized reports can focus on specific areas of concern, such as duplicate payments, unusual expense categories, voided transactions and vendor payments. Accounting outsourcing professionals can help you determine which reports are the most useful based on your business to help signal fraud.

Limit User Access

Limiting a user’s ability to access important data and engage in certain transactions is a crucial component of an effective internal control system. With the right software, you can limit user access to trusted individuals and designated team members, which can reduce the likelihood of fraud happening.

Create Fraud Awareness

By leveraging robust, reliable software, you can streamline the detection, reporting and investigation of potential fraud. This facilitates a culture of fraud awareness filtered from the accounting department to the rest of the organization. The proactive nature of utilizing reliable software can thwart would-be fraudsters by minimizing perceived opportunities for fraud to happen, thereby minimizing the organization’s potential for losses.

Let Us Fortify Your Accounting Practices

Ready to experience the many benefits of outsourced accounting and learn how we can help protect your business? Doeren Mayhew's accounting outsourcing professionals can implement advanced financial software to help your business adopt a proactive approach to loss prevention and grow an internal culture of financial fraud awareness. Stay one step ahead while better organizing your financial data and processes. Want to learn more about our accounting outsourcing services? Contact us today.