Disciplines
Custody, testing
and the entry.
Procured separately these are several suppliers and a standing reconciliation between them. Administered as one practice they share a register, a control set and an evidence trail, and the determination recorded against a payment is the same record the ledger is drawn from.
Payables control
Custody of the obligation from intake to settlement confirmation, exercised under documented control rather than reviewed after the fact.
Intake and registration
Capture, indexing, extraction and registration against the register. Coding, GL and cost-object assignment. Purchase-order and receipt referencing. Three-way matching, with quantity, price, tax, freight and unit-of-measure variance measured against match tolerance, under and over tolerance.
Authorisation
Parking, blocking and release exercised within delegated authority and authorisation limits. Payable and liability creation. Payment-term determination, due-date and discount-date calculation. Nothing is released by the performer who prepared it.
Disbursement
Payment proposal, selection, prioritisation, scheduling, grouping and batching. Payment-file creation, validation and authorisation. Beneficiary and bank-account verification with independent callback. Bank submission and acknowledgment, execution status, settlement confirmation.
Clearing
Clearing entry, payment application, residual and vendor-account clearing. Supplier-statement reconciliation. Aging carried in due and overdue buckets, with blocked and exception queues worked to depth rather than to age. Duplicate-document and duplicate-payment prevention.
Receivables control
Custody of the receivable from billing through collection recovery, with exposure measured continuously rather than at period end.
Billing and exposure
Billing, receivable creation and posting. Statement generation and delivery. Credit management, credit limit, credit exposure, and credit, order and billing holds applied at the point of exposure rather than after it.
Collections
Collection activity, queue and strategy. Dunning and reminder cycle. Delinquency and past-due management. Aging buckets, promise to pay and payment commitment recorded against the account.
Cash application
Cash receipt, identification, matching, allocation and posting. Automatic and manual application. Unapplied, unidentified and on-account receipts. One-to-many and many-to-one application, partial and residual application, over- and underapplication.
Deductions and provision
Short-pay handling, deduction management and dispute management worked to determination. Bad-debt provision, doubtful-account allowance, write-off and collection recovery.
Assurance
Testing performed on the population while the funds remain under the principal's control, not on a sample once they have left it.
Procedure
Inspection, observation, inquiry and walkthrough. Vouching, tracing, recalculation and reperformance. External and internal confirmation, corroboration and cross-checking.
Sampling
Random, judgmental, statistical, attribute and monetary-unit sampling against an established population. Deviation rate measured against tolerable deviation, projected error against tolerable error.
Assertions
Completeness, accuracy, cutoff, existence, valuation, rights, obligation, classification, authorisation and presentation. Control and compliance testing against design effectiveness and operating effectiveness, held apart.
Analysis
Analytical procedures, reasonableness and variance testing, trend and pattern analysis. Exception and root-cause analysis distinguishing systemic from isolated, and true positive from false. Duplicate, anomaly, overbilling and leakage detection.
Close and reconciliation
The entries that follow the disbursement, drawn from the record that authorised it rather than re-keyed from a statement.
Recognition
Expense recognition, accrued liability, prepaid expense, deferred revenue, accrued and unbilled revenue. Work in progress, inventory movement, cost-of-goods recognition, reserve movement and impairment. Intercompany allocation and elimination.
Journals
Preparation, validation, routing, authorisation, posting and reversal. Recurring, standard, adjusting, reclassification, allocation, accrual and deferral journals. Posting key, document type, period and account determination.
Reconciliation
Ledger-to-subledger, bank-to-book, control-account and intercompany reconciliation. Reconciling items separated into timing and permanent, supported and unsupported, and aged accordingly. Ownership, certification and approval recorded against a named performer.
Rollforward
Opening and closing balance, period movement, account activity and turnover, balance and account rollforward carried without manual adjustment between periods.
Control environment
The architecture the other disciplines are executed under, and the reason a determination can be relied upon later.
Separation
Control objective, activity, frequency, performer, reviewer and approver, each named. Maker-checker separation, segregation of duties, delegated authority and authorisation limits, with escalation above them to an exception committee.
Disbursement controls
Beneficiary and bank-account verification, ownership verification, independent callback. Payment-limit and payment-velocity checks, allowlists, payment block and suspension. Sanctions and watchlist screening, conflict checking.
Effectiveness
Entity-level, transaction-level, application and IT-dependent controls. Exception rate measured against control threshold. Control gap, redundant and complementary controls, remediation plan, retest and validation. Rationalisation only on evidence, never on volume.
Evidence
Record lineage, calculation, decision and execution trace. Immutable evidence, record certification and attestation, retention and disposition. A determination that cannot be reconstructed was never a control.
Engagement
Submit a population.
A register extract, the terms it was raised under, and the aging it sits in. The practice returns the exceptions identified, the assertions tested, and the determination it would have recorded against each.