Accounting system setup, policies and procedures

The core deliverable is a written accounting policies and procedures manual covering the monthly close, transaction coding standards, and how approvals move through the business. It sits alongside a documented approval matrix, spend limits and transaction types mapped to specific approval authority, so every purchase or payment has a clear, written rule for who signs off.

A record-retention schedule sets out how long each document type, invoices, bank statements, payroll records, tax filings, needs to be kept and where, built to standard practice for tax and lending purposes. A new-hire or new-team onboarding guide rounds out the package, written so someone new to the business can follow the accounting function without a verbal handoff that only happens once and is never written down.

We start by observing how your close actually runs today, not how you assume it runs, since the two are often different once someone has been doing the work for a while without writing it down. That includes who currently approves what, how transactions get coded, and where the close tends to slow down or depend on one specific person's judgment.

From there we draft the manual section by section: approval matrix first, since it touches every other process, then the close checklist, then coding standards, then record retention. Each draft goes back to you for review before it becomes the standard, since a procedure nobody agreed to follow is a document, not a process. Once approved, we help implement it inside your accounting system, setting up approval workflows and access controls that match what the manual says on paper.

This fits any business where the accounting process currently depends on one person's memory or informal habit rather than a written standard, especially ahead of a staffing change, a lender's diligence request, or simply growing past the point where informal coordination still works. A business bringing on its first outsourced accounting team, or its first internal controller, benefits from having the process written down before that handoff rather than during it.

It also fits businesses preparing for a sale, a raise, or a first audit, where a buyer, investor or auditor will specifically ask whether documented controls exist, not just whether the numbers happen to be correct this quarter.

The most common gap is no written approval limits at all: spend decisions route through whoever happens to be available, with no consistent rule for what requires a second signature. The second is a close process that exists only in one person's head, so a vacation or a resignation turns a routine month-end close into a fire drill.

We also regularly find no segregation of duties between who enters a transaction and who approves it, sometimes because the business is small enough that the same one or two people do everything, in which case we design compensating controls, a second reviewer, a periodic spot-check, rather than pretending full segregation is realistic at that size. Missing or informal record retention is another frequent fix: documents scattered across email, personal drives and paper files with no consistent rule for how long anything needs to be kept.

The manual is written to match the system you actually use, QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite or Sage Intacct, since a procedure that describes a workflow the software cannot actually enforce is not worth much. Where your platform supports built-in approval workflows or user permission levels, we configure them to mirror the approval matrix on paper, not just describe it in a document nobody checks against.

For businesses using a separate bill-pay or expense-management tool, we document how that tool's own approval routing connects to the accounting system's chart of accounts and coding standards, so the written policy and the software configuration actually match.

A policies and procedures manual is typically a fixed-scope project priced separately from ongoing monthly bookkeeping or accounting service, since it is a one-time build with periodic updates rather than a recurring monthly deliverable. Scope depends on business complexity, entity count, and how much of the underlying process already exists informally versus needing to be designed from scratch.

Most single-entity businesses fit a defined project fee confirmed after a short scoping call; multi-entity businesses or those needing detailed segregation-of-duties design across several departments usually move to a Scale-tier custom quote. Current published starting ranges for related ongoing services are on the rate card at /us/pricing; the manual itself is quoted as a project once scope is confirmed.

A manual that describes controls, approval limits, segregation of duties, access review, but is never checked against what actually happens, drifts from reality within a year. We build a short annual review into the manual itself: revisit the approval matrix when spend authority changes, update the close checklist when the accounting system changes, and confirm segregation of duties still holds as headcount changes.

Most internal control frameworks used by US accountants and auditors describe control activities across five linked components, control environment, risk assessment, control activities, information and communication, and monitoring, and we design the manual to cover all five rather than just the transaction-level approval rules that are easiest to write down. This is preparation, not an audit or an attestation: an independent firm performs any audit or review opinion, and legal review of contracts or authority delegated under the manual is coordinated with your attorney.