Segregation of Duties: Safeguard Your Business Operations with the Help of TeamBlueSky

Segregation of duties can be a difficult concept for many business operators. The focus on task delegation is often on keeping payroll costs down and employees busy. If an employee has the skill set to perform multiple duties, businesses often won't consider hiring a second person, seeing this as an unnecessary expense. Unfortunately, when considering how vital this one person can become to a business's operations and the amassed power that they hold, the risk of having them perform multiple roles can turn into the most significant expense of all. 

Segregation of duties is a crucial risk mitigation tool, and outsourcing financial and accounting responsibilities can provide businesses with a level of security that cannot be reached by performing all duties internally. For over 15 years, TeamBlueSky's team of NetSuite and JCurve specialist providers have been helping Australian businesses running on these cloud platforms to manage their back-office and accounting functions and increase their efficiency and security with our BPO and outsourced payroll services. Read on to discover how we can implement safeguards in your NetSuite or JCurve account to reduce financial risks and learn what services we can offer to segregate your organisation's duties in a way that maximises security and business performance while keeping costs down.

What is Segregation of Duties?

Segregation of duties is an internal control focused on preventing error and the risk of inviting fraud by making sure no less than two individuals are responsible for performing separate components of any given task. No single employee should be in control of multiple aspects of a company's finances, as the risk of erroneous and inappropriate actions being performed can place your organisation in significant jeopardy. Without sufficient duty segregation to safeguard your business, it can become vulnerable to common routes of embezzlement such as:

• Creating and approving payments for personal expenses
• Creating pay runs in the name of non-existent employees but making them payable to themselves
• Inflating the cost of corporate purchases and personally withholding the difference

Many organisations, particularly small businesses, struggle to segregate duties due to staff cohort size. Fraud aside, any individual being the only employee within an organisation to possess essential skills can place them under undue pressure and presents operational setbacks if they take leave or resign. Outsourcing the four most common financial accounting activities, AP, AR, Bookkeeping, and Payroll, is one of the best possible solutions to eliminating this threat. TeamBlueSky specialises in providing these services for NetSuite and JCurve customers, offering both operational skills and system configuration to ensure that your business is as safeguarded from error and fraud as possible.

How TeamBlueSky's services can segregate duties for your organisation

Optimising NetSuite functionality to segregate duties and introduce safeguards

TeamBlueSky can work with you to audit and modify NetSuite user roles to ensure permissions align with the system functionalities each user needs to perform their duties, ensuring that sensitive information is concealed from select roles where necessary. We can also introduce workflows so that transaction approval is, for example, limited to a particular user or NetSuite role, or requires the authorisation of two separate users. When separating duties and introducing workflows, we consider:

• Authorisation: Who approves transactions?
• Safekeeping: Who has access to records, and who has the ability to view, edit, and/or delete them?
• Record Keeping: What workflows are in place to ensure more than one person is required to complete a process so that assets and liabilities can be tracked?

The advantages of outsourcing to segregate operational duties

While duty segregation can be difficult to achieve, particularly in small-to-medium enterprises, outsourcing serves as a secure solution to segregating duties by reducing fraud risks and costly errors. Beyond risk mitigation, partnering with an outsourced solutions provider facilitates overall cost savings, scalability, and tech enablement. An added advantage of partnering with TeamBlueSky is the opportunity to gain access to best-in-class practices we’ve acquired from individuals and businesses similar to yours. Other added benefits of outsourcing your BPO and accounting functions include:

• Decreasing key personnel risks
• Access to accounting and system expertise
• Flexible and scalable solutions
• Segregation of duties
• Heightened data security
• Eliminating HR burden
• Not having to physically accommodate additional staff

Want to learn more about how TeamBlueSky can boost security by segregating duties for your organisation?

TeamBlueSky's team of NetSuite and JCurve specialist providers collectively have over 30 years of expertise with these cloud platforms, including CPA-qualified accounting professionals. TeamBlueSky can conduct a risk assessment and advise how to best segregate duties to yield the most secure and risk-free operational framework for your organisation.

Whether it be duties of an accounting, payroll, or systems administration nature, segregating duties with TeamBlueSky can help eradicate fraud, bolster security, and streamline your business's everyday processes. Paired with our NetSuite expertise, TeamBlueSky can ensure that your business processes are both protected and optimised for success.

If you'd like us to perform a risk assessment on your organisation and want to engage our services to segregate duties within your organisation, please reach out to our team of NetSuite experts for an obligation-free discussion today.