Only You Can Prevent Fraud

We’ll not really. But it worked for Smokey the Bear’s ‘Only You Can Prevent Wildfires’ campaign when I was a kid. When a giant grizzly bear pointed his finger at me and made it clear that Bambi’s life depended entirely on how careful I was with matches, I was scared straight. Many campfires later, I’m proud to say that I’ve never laid waste to Bambi’s homeland. So I thought I’d begin an awareness campaign of my own, starting with the profession that uses matches around small business.

To compound our deepening recession, billion dollar frauds are making headlines with unhealthy regularity. While I hope your clients haven’t been scammed by fraudsters like Stanford and Madoff, those headlines should be a reminder that theft happens on Main Street as well as Wall Street. If you look past the billion dollar headlines, you’ll find a recent WSJ article that hit much closer to home for us: fraud in our small business clients.

For most of our small business clients, a $25K - $50K fraud would put them out of business. Here are a few tips to keep your clients out of the courthouse and the poorhouse.

Awareness: Remind your clients about fraud at least a few times annually. Emailing them a WSJ article is one easy way to maintain awareness. An informed owner is the best defense.

Prevention: Basic internal controls, like the segregation of recording and authorizing transactions, go a long way. Your firm, or the owner, should regularly review bank statements and copies of cancelled checks for irregularities. Consider offering a service after tax season to review internal controls.

Insurance: Owners should consider bonding employees who have access to cash and company resources. What looks expensive today is a bargain after a loss.

Audit Trail: QuickBooks maintains an audit trail in the event you need to trace irregularities to a user- if you are enforcing user and password rules. For companies with more risk, consider upgrading to QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions which has stronger controls to segregate duties and help prevent fraud.

The current environment of fear and distrust presents an opportunity for you to step up and be the trusted advisor to your clients.

Be proactive about addressing fraud & prevention with your small business clients.

The More, the Merrier

Monitors that is. Adding a second or even third monitor to the workstations of your professional staff is probably the single best way to increase firm productivity. A recent NY Times article analyzing an NEC commissioned study “found people who used two 20-inch monitors were 44 percent more productive [than] people using a single 18-inch monitor.” Increasing productivity is directly correlated to increasing firm profitability.

Whenever I train accountants, I informally pulse the group about who is leveraging multiple monitors in their practices. Usually about 40% of the accountants are using at least 2 monitors. In the 2009 Benchmarking Paperless Office Best Practices, the Association for Accounting Administration found that 90% of its members were using multiple monitors, up from 69% the year before.

While the time savings I hear from accountants using multiple monitors ranges from 15 – 30%, they universally agree they would never go back to a single monitor configuration. I agree and here’s why:

First, our world is increasingly digital to digital and less analog to digital. Yes, we still enter a lot of data from paper, but more and more of our data is already in digital form when we receive it. Think of how much information you receive in emails, Excel files, trial balances and accounting files that you move to tax or other applications. Even if your office isn’t ‘paperless’ by industry definitions, your office, and all your data, is digital. The paper is just a backup. As we increasingly push digital data around our desktops, a second monitor effectively stands up what used to be paper (and is now email, Excel, PDF, Trial Balances, etc) next to the application on the primary monitor to which we are entering.

Second, as accountants we routinely multi-task with different clients, different engagements and different applications. I regularly use at least 8 concurrent applications. Count your own windows. The number of paths we can take to accomplish routine tasks is literally exponential, which is why we inadvertently get lost in the digital maze.

Simple tasks like responding to an email, requires that we switch applications to review the tax return, financials, or other data file, and then take action in a different application like updating missing data or calendaring an appointment, before we even reply to the email. My PC keeps track of separate threads much better than I do. If I don’t keep my email anchored where I can see it while I cycle through 3 or 4 applications to solve it, I quickly get lost and start working another unfinished task. A few hours later, I’ll find my unfinished email still open. Multiple monitors are like a compass and map, keeping us moving in a (relatively) straight line.

And finally, multiple monitors are just cool. They make tax and accounting more fun (what can I say- I’m an accountant), and tell the world your firm is progressive. Multi-monitors keep staff engaged, and contribute to attracting and retaining quality talent.

At a cost of about $300 / workstation to add a video card ($50) and monitor ($250), the ROI is first grade math. Add the cost of an IT professional if you aren’t handy with electronics. Like most things, size matters. The new minimum monitor standard is 22”, but prices have dropped to an affordable $200 - $250 for high quality 22” monitors.

“Should I just buy 1 really big monitor?” I hear this question occasionally and my stock answer is ‘no.’ While a few accountants prefer to tile windows on a single monitor, it is usually much easier to size an entire application on a single monitor and leave it there for easy reference. If you are continually sizing and moving windows around, you begin to dilute the productivity benefit.

If you aren’t in the club already, join the best-in-class accounting firms using multiple monitors to increase productivity, profitability and employee engagement.