Audit and Review Readiness
Assess whether your trial balance, reconciliations, schedules, contracts, controls, and prepared-by-client package are ready for external accountants.
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For owners, founders, and finance leaders
Internal Controls and Approval Workflow Check
Identify high-risk gaps in cash access, approvals, segregation of duties, payroll, vendor setup, journal entries, and financial review.
5 guided steps
Private in your browser
Official guidance links
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Your free guided checker
Answer a few quick questions below. It is private - nothing is submitted or stored - and takes about a minute.
Informational business diagnostic only; not accounting, audit, tax, legal, investment, lending, or valuation advice.
The questions this tool walks you through
Here is what the checker asks and why each step matters. Prefer to talk it through? Contact us and we will help directly.
In the last two years, have you had a theft, a fraud, a bounced or duplicate payment, or a material error that reached the financial statements?
A loss that already happened points to a specific broken control, and remediating that named weakness comes before general clean-up.
Remediate the specific weakness the loss exposed before broader control work.
Official guidance: GAO Standards for Internal Control
Can a single person both set up or change who gets paid and then release the payment, without a second person in between?
One person controlling both the vendor or bank details and the money leaving is the classic fraud path, and separating those two hands is the highest-value fix.
Use the interactive tool above to see how this applies to your situation.
Official guidance: GAO Standards for Internal Control
Do you have at least three people available to split finance duties, so that whoever handles cash is not also the one reviewing the bank reconciliation?
With three or more people, true separation of duties is realistic; with fewer, the answer is compensating controls and tight owner review rather than splitting roles that do not exist.
Split incompatible duties so no one person can pay themselves undetected. Put owner-run compensating controls around cash where staff is too small to separate.
Official guidance: GAO Standards for Internal Control
Are payments and payroll approved against written dollar limits, so that anything above a set threshold needs a second sign-off before it is released?
Approval limits turn "someone probably looked at it" into a rule the system enforces, and they are what an owner leans on once duties are already separated.
Set written approval limits and a second sign-off above each threshold.
Official guidance: GAO Standards for Internal Control
Is someone who cannot move money independently reviewing the bank and key account reconciliations each month, with the review evidenced?
An independent monthly reconciliation review is the detective control that catches what approval limits miss; without evidence of who reviewed it, the control is hard to rely on.
Write the control framework down and monitor it so it survives staff turnover. Add an independent monthly reconciliation review as your key detective control.
Official guidance: GAO Standards for Internal Control
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