One of the biggest threats to modern businesses of all variety is fraud. The internet has opened up a host of avenues which allow criminals to exploit the weaknesses of your company. It should be one of your major priorities to protect your business in every way that you can. While there are no surefire ways of preventing fraud of all variety, there are some ways of giving your business a higher level of protection. Let’s look at some of them in this blog post.
Keep a Closer Eye on Your Employees
A lot of issues arise internally, so it is important that you take steps to make sure that your employees are trustworthy. This should start off with your hiring process. When you are looking to take on a new member of staff, you should do proper background checks on them. Separate your financial duties so that no single person has access to all your important details. Check your accounts on a regular basis for signs of financial irregularities. Set up an inventory control policy to check that things aren’t walking out the door which shouldn’t be.
Prevent Transaction Losses
Though a lot of transactions are made using credit cards these days, if you run a business which accepts cash, you should train your employees on the ways that you can spot counterfeit money. As well as this, you could also provide training on how to spot bad cheques and stolen credit cards. You should also come up with specific policies which detail how to deal with each one of these individual situations.
Review Your Clients
Fraud can also come from your clients, so you want to double check that they are credible – particularly if they are placing a large order with your business. Make a point of reviewing your accounts payable, invoices, and purchase orders on a regular basis to check that they are coming from real vendors and you are getting all of the items that you were promised as part of the deal.
Prevent Cyber-crime
Cyber-crime can be an issue for small businesses, as well as all the larger firms out there. So, you need to be taking steps to stop this from becoming an issue. This means making sure that your firewalls and antivirus systems are all up to date and working at full capacity. It also means making sure that you come up with company-wide policies about preventing fraud and prevent eCheck fraud. You should make sure that you keep up with what some of the most common scams out there are so that you know what you need to be watching out for.
Running a business responsibly means making sure that you are aware of the threats that you are facing, and that you are taking active measures to ensure that you are not at risk of getting hit by the common scams out there.