3 Fraud Prevention Strategies for Your Business

Internal theft in business is all too common. Search the internet and you will find many articles about embezzlement by trusted employees. 


The good news: There are steps you can take to safeguard yourself and your company without relying on ‘trust’ as a method of prevention.


Reduce the risk of fraud in your business by following these three steps.

1. Establish Internal Controls 

One of the easiest ways to protect yourself against fraud is to have processes in place so no one person has access to your accounts. Creating a process in which there are at least two signatures or approvals on every check or expenditure can help. 


There are electronic systems that can assist you in tracking this approval process and provide tiers of approval. For example, if there is a bill over $5,000, you can require the head of the department to approve it, in addition to the two other approvers.


You should also perform unannounced audits on the system. When you do this, you can catch issues early or deter them entirely—it’s harder to embezzle money when the system is reviewed unexpectedly. 


One of the biggest issues we encounter involves sharing usernames and passwords. Please do not give anyone full access to your accounts. This includes bank accounts, credit cards, and your accounting system. There are permission levels for all these accounts to keep you and your company safe.

2. Establish Separation of Duties

This principle is the basis of a solid internal control system. It involves dividing the responsibility of a process between two or more people. 


For example, the person who collects checks from clients should not be the same person who deposits those checks. The person who reconciles the bank statement should not be the same person who approves payments. And the person who runs payroll should not be on payroll (they should not be paying themselves).

3. Utilize Outsourcing

One of the most effective ways to reduce your risk of fraud is to outsource your bookkeeping and accounting to an experienced company. This provider will be able to create internal controls and have a road map for separation of duties, which will eliminate the risks involved. They will have processes in place to review your transactions, ask questions, and ensure oversight on others in the accounting system.


Implementing fraud prevention strategies now will not only help you control the situation, but it will also save you time and money in the future.

Our Latest Insight

Growth Impacts: Why This Relationship Breaks Down at $2M to $15M (And What It Costs You)

By Alisa McCabe • October 15, 2026
​There is a frustrating stage of growth when the business makes more money and becomes harder to run. You expected growth to create leverage. Instead, your calendar is fuller and decisions take longer. Projects compete for the same people. Expenses become harder to explain. Accounting needs more information from Operations. Operations needs more information from Accounting. And the accounting systems that carried you to $2 million were not built for $15 million. Nothing necessarily looks broken. That is what makes this stage so deceptive. The processes that got you here may still work. Your people may still be good. Your customers may still be buying. What changed is the weight your existing structure is being asked to carry. At $2 million, you can still personally compensate for the gaps. Somewhere on the road to $5 million, $10 million, or $15 million, that stops being possible. The business did not suddenly become dysfunctional. It outgrew its dependence on informal coordination.  Part 5 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

Fixing It: How to Build the COO-Accounting Relationship Your Business Is Missing

By Alisa McCabe • October 12, 2026
If Article 3 felt a little too familiar, your first instinct may be to call a meeting. You tell Operations and Accounting they need to communicate better. That will not fix it. The five warning signs were never personality problems. They were signs that your accounting systems and routines were never intentionally built around how these two functions work together. People cannot follow a structure that does not exist. Accounting cannot inform decisions they do not know are being considered. Your COO cannot use financial information they cannot access in time. The fix is not complicated. That does not mean it happens naturally. Most of what you need to build will feel almost obvious. Recurring conversations. Clear handoffs. Shared definitions. Access to the right information. This is not glamorous work. That is probably one reason it gets overlooked. For the first few months, you may have to follow up constantly. People will forget. Meetings will get moved. Someone will make a decision and skip the handoff. Then something starts to change. The follow-up becomes unnecessary. Information moves without you. Problems get caught earlier. Eventually the results look effortless from the outside. They were not. You built the relationship that made them possible. ​ Part 4 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

Five Warning Signs Your COO and Accounting Aren’t Talking

By Alisa McCabe • September 28, 2026
Article 2 ended with a question. What would you actually see first if this relationship started breaking down inside your business? Here is the answer. You would see five things. If you are like most owners reading this, you are already looking at two or three of them. None of the five announces itself as a communication problem. Each one shows up as friction inside your accounting systems, wearing a perfectly reasonable disguise. That is the difficulty. On the surface, none of these looks like a broken relationship. Each looks like something else entirely. A busy month. A tough quarter. A personality difference between two people who were never going to be friends anyway. Every one of them gets explained away the first time you see it. That is exactly what makes them expensive. This article does not fix any of it. Article 4 does that. The job here is naming what is already sitting in front of you. Most owners walk past these signs for years without recognizing what they are looking at. ​ Part 3 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship