Separating duties in a small advice practice

How a small advice practice splits who captures, approves and pays, so no one person controls a whole purchase, payroll run or write-off.

By Achekam · 11 October 2026 · 4 min read · For Financial services businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya

In a practice of three, everybody does a bit of everything. The office manager orders the printer toner, enters the supplier's invoice and pays it. The senior adviser approves leave, looks at payroll and signs off the month. It works because everyone trusts everyone, and it keeps working right up to the day an invoice from a supplier nobody remembers turns out to have been paid every month for as long as anyone can remember.

Separating duties is not about suspecting your colleagues. It is about arranging the work so that a mistake, or a temptation, is seen by a second person before it costs money. Achekam enforces some of these splits on its own, and it helps to design the rest of your routine around them.

Why small practices are exposed

Large firms have finance departments with separate people for buying, receiving, paying and reviewing. A small advice practice has the same transactions and a fraction of the people. The result is that one person can often start a transaction, approve it, pay it and file it, with nobody else ever seeing it.

AccountingTools defines segregation of duties as assigning the steps in a process to different people so that no one person can both commit and conceal theft or error. The key word is conceal. The aim is not to stop people doing things; it is to make sure whatever they do is visible to somebody else.

Purchases: requisition, order and approval by different people

Achekam's procurement builds the split into each step:

1. Someone raises a purchase requisition saying what is needed, why and the estimated cost. A person other than the requester approves or declines it.
2. Suppliers' quotations are captured against the requisition and one is chosen. Choosing one that is not the cheapest needs a written reason, which is kept.
3. A purchase order is raised from the selected quotation. The person who raised it cannot approve it.
4. When the supplier's invoice is recorded against the order, it is matched with what was ordered and what arrived, and a difference in price or quantity holds it until someone writes a resolution note.

Suppliers are picked from one supplier list with duplicate checks by name or VAT number, which makes it harder for a second version of a real supplier, with different bank details, to slip in.

Not every toner order needs a requisition. Agree a level, in writing, above which purchases go through procurement, and keep everyday items below it.

Bills that wait for approval before they post

For costs that do not go through a purchase order, such as the monthly software subscription or the professional body's annual fee, the supplier bill is recorded line by line with VAT. A bill without a purchase order waits for approval before it posts. Bills are paid in full or in parts from a bank account you choose.

Arrange it so the person who captures bills is not the person who approves them, and neither of them is the person who releases the payment at the bank. In a practice of three, that is exactly three people, which is why it is worth writing down.

Payroll: preparer, approver and bank-detail verifier

Payroll is where Achekam is strictest. A pay run is approved by someone other than the person who prepared it, nobody can approve a run that pays themselves, and an approved run is never recalculated. An employee's bank account entered or changed by one person must be verified by another before it is paid in the payment schedule or bank file.

Bank details are the classic route for payroll fraud: change a salary's destination account and the money goes elsewhere while the payslip looks normal. The verifier should check every change against a document from the employee, such as a bank letter, and should call the employee on a number already on file, not one supplied with the change request.

If your practice buys the procurement integrity review add-on, it raises questions about warning patterns such as competing quotes sharing contact or bank details, or a supplier being paid into an employee's bank account. It raises questions; a person still has to answer them.

Write-offs and reopening closed months

Two last places where one person should never act alone:

• Write-offs. An unpaid client fee can be written off only once a partner approves. Otherwise a fee collected in cash and pocketed could simply be written off by the person who took it.
• Closed months. Months can be soft-closed, hard-closed and locked, and a closed month refuses postings from every source. Reopening a hard close needs a second approver, so figures already reported to the bank or your accountant cannot be changed quietly.

A duty map for a team of three

Here is one way to split the work between a principal, a senior adviser and an office manager. Adjust the names, but keep the pattern: nobody both starts and finishes the same transaction.

When someone is away, decide in advance who covers, and make sure the cover does not end up holding both halves of the same duty.

For the payroll rule in a small team, see who approves payroll in a small brokerage. Bank-detail fraud is covered in stopping ghost workers and bank detail fraud, and for keeping reported months fixed, read locking a month once its figures are reported.

General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.