Payment Approval Stages: A suggested approach - Auditing, monitoring and verification

Auditing processes are important to assist in the preventiion of fraud. It is important to have documented audit processes to evaluate whether a system relies on trust rather than robust process that remove to need for trust.

What are some of the processes that you would look at for auditing and verification?

Auditing reports

there are auditing functions at various stages of the approval process, some reports include: 

Report	Summary
Transaction audit history	This provides details of who added a transaction, who changed a transaction and what detail has been changed like the payee and the bank account details.
Batch approval information	The batch information show who approved each stage of a batch as well as who submitted and posted the batch.
Transaction Status	How do we see the workflow of uploading files to the bank account?

Monitoring bottle necks in the process

If someone doesn't perform their tasks within a step in the workflow, this may lead to a bottle neck. So how do we identify where a payment is in the workflow chain?

• Unsubmitted Batches
  
  The home page provides monitoring on the approval workflow.
  
  From the home page "Payment and Receipt Approval - Batches (Batch progress All Users)" you can see all unsubmitted items. 
  
  
• Payments Awaiting Approval
  
  From the home page "Payment and Receipt Approval - Batches (Batch progress All Users)" you can see all items pending authorisation. 
  
  
• Unposted Batches 
  
  From the home page "Payment and Receipt Approval - Batches (Batch progress All Users)" you can see all unposted batches. 
  
  
• Bank files waiting to be uploaded and waiting to be approved online
  
  From the home page "Transactions (Bankfeed batches)" you can see the upload files that have not been authorised yet.
  
  
  From the bank register you can see the status of each entry.
  
  How do we avoid payments going stale?
  How do we send reminders to authorisers?

Checking a sample of recipients

A useful process to audit the bank account details appearing on a transaction. Have an independent user pick a sample of random transactions before they are paid and have that user ring up those payees and verify the bank account details.

This also provides a disincentive for data entry operators to enter bank details incorrectly and verifies that the bank account details are correctly checked in the "finance" stage.