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Home > Money > Fraud > SMART

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Do We Safely Handle Our Money?

Take this assessment to see if your church is properly protecting its finances.
posted 5/14/2008

Try also: Audit, Bookkeeping, Budget, CPA, Finance, Financial audit, Financial reporting, Money

Do We Safely Handle Our Money?

Here are a set of questions to help you and your church assess your internal controls.

Last Name:

First Name:

Do we count and record offerings immediately after they are received? Every moment they sit around uncounted is a moment when they can be dipped in to.

	Yes
	No

Are offerings always stored in a secure or well-supervised area?

	Yes
	No

Do we count our cash and checks twice for accuracy? To err in addition is human. But the more we check our work, the more we develop careful accounting habits and avoid careless accounting mistakes.

	Yes
	No

Do we place offerings in lockbags (money bags provided by the bank requiring a key to open) after counting?

	Yes
	No

Do we place the lockbags in a safe or a night depository until the bank opens?

	Yes
	No

Do we strictly limit who has access to the safe?

	Yes
	No

Do we change the safe combination when someone is no longer authorized to use it?

	Yes
	No

Do we make sure that the same person is not involved in more than one of the financial procedures of the church (collecting funds, counting them, recording teh giving, authorizing expenditures, writing the checks, auditing the account)? The more access a person has to the various procedures, the greater the ability to misuse funds.

	Yes
	No

Do we provide the bank with annual updates of persons authorized to sign checks against any account associated with the church? Some banks are surprisingly not strict about who signs checks for a church or for a particular program of the church. They know we're a volunteer organization with a high turnover in leadership. We are wise to make sure they know who exactly can write checks, and for what.