Quick Answer
To check your bookkeeper’s work, run five checks each month: pull your bank statement directly from the bank instead of accepting one from your bookkeeper, tie the cash line on your balance sheet to that statement, scan the vendor list for names you don’t recognize, read the explanations on the adjusting journal entries, and open your accounting software’s audit log. Together they take about twenty minutes. They catch ordinary errors far more often than anything worse — and a good bookkeeper is glad you’re running them.
In September 2025, a bookkeeper named Hava Yfrah Austin was sentenced in federal court in South Florida to 51 months in prison for embezzling $9.8 million from the company whose books she kept.
She had signature authority over its bank accounts. She moved money out by unauthorized wire transfer to a business she owned, and covered it in the ledger with entries under vendor names that were fake but looked almost exactly like the real ones. The scheme ran from 2018 to April 2024. Roughly six years.
Nobody was reading the vendor list.
I’m opening with that case for one reason: the thing that would have caught it takes five minutes and no accounting knowledge at all. Not an audit. Not a forensic engagement. Somebody scrolling a list of vendor names and stopping at one they didn’t recognize.
So, plainly, before anything else: your bookkeeper is almost certainly honest. The overwhelming majority of people in this profession are decent, competent, and working harder on your books than you realize. Cases like Austin’s make headlines because they’re rare. If you finish this post feeling suspicious of the person who keeps your books, I’ve written it badly.
What I want is for you to have a habit — the same way you glance at a credit card statement, not because you suspect your card company, but because looking is how anyone catches anything. Most of what these checks turn up isn’t fraud. It’s a miscategorized transfer, a duplicated deposit, a bill in the wrong month: cheap to fix now, expensive to fix in March.
And the uncomfortable part: I want my own clients running these checks on me. I’d rather a client asked me an awkward question in month two than discovered something in year three.
“My Books Are Done” and “My Books Are Right” Are Two Different Claims
When your bookkeeper emails “everything’s reconciled for October,” there are two claims inside that sentence. The first is that the work happened — transactions categorized, accounts reconciled, reports generated. That’s almost always true. The second is that the result is accurate: that the numbers correspond to money that actually moved, in the direction and the amount the books say. That claim drives every decision you make and every return you file, and it’s almost never verified by anyone except the person who produced it.
That’s not a scandal, it’s the structure of the arrangement. One person does the work, the same person checks it, and the owner receives a PDF. A large company breaks that loop with segregation of duties and internal audit. In a six-person business, the only person available to break it is you.
Check 1 — Pull the Bank Statement From the Bank, Not From Your Bookkeeper
Time: 90 seconds. This is the one that matters most.
Log in to your bank’s website yourself and download last month’s statement. Not the one attached to your bookkeeper’s email. Not the PDF in the shared folder. Go to the source.
Every other number in your financial statements is an interpretation — someone decided what a transaction was and where it belonged. The bank statement is the one document produced by an independent party with no stake in how your books look, and the only one nobody involved can edit. That matters because concealment is the norm in these cases, not the exception. In the ACFE’s Occupational Fraud 2026: A Report to the Nations — 2,402 cases across 143 countries, more than $3.4 billion in losses — only 11% of perpetrators used no concealment at all. Thirty-nine percent created fraudulent physical documents; 33% altered existing ones.
While you’re in there, confirm you actually can log in. If your bank access runs through your bookkeeper, change that this week — read-only access for a bookkeeper is a standard entitlement at every major US business bank, not a favor.
Check 2 — Tie the Cash Line on the Balance Sheet to That Statement
Time: 3 minutes.
Open your balance sheet as of the last day of the month, find the checking account, and compare it to the ending balance on the statement you just downloaded.
They’ll usually differ slightly, and that’s normal — a check you wrote on the 29th may not have cleared until the 3rd. The reconciliation report explains the gap, and what you’re checking is whether that explanation is reasonable. A few hundred dollars of outstanding checks: fine. A $14,000 difference with no reconciling items listed: ask. A reconciliation that balances only because of an adjustment labeled “reconciliation discrepancy” or “opening balance equity”: ask harder. That’s the accounting equivalent of shoving papers in a drawer to clean a desk.
Do the same for savings, each credit card, and the merchant processor. Cash is the account most likely to reveal a problem somewhere else, so when it ties month after month, a whole category of trouble is off the table.
Check 3 — Scan the Vendor List for Names You Don’t Recognize
Time: 5 minutes.
This is the Austin check.
Run an expense-by-vendor report for the month and read the names. Not the amounts — the names. You’re looking for three things: a vendor you’ve never heard of, a vendor that looks almost like one you know, and a vendor whose payments have quietly grown.
The middle one is the Austin technique — fake names closely resembling legitimate ones. “Meridian Supply Co.” next to “Meridian Supply Company.” You’ll never catch that in a total. You catch it by reading names you know and feeling a small snag on the one that’s off.
Billing schemes — payments to a vendor that doesn’t do anything, or does less than it bills for — are the most over-represented fraud scheme in small business. In the ACFE study they appeared in 28% of cases at organizations with fewer than 100 employees, against 18% at larger ones; check and payment tampering ran 18% versus 8%. Billing schemes also ran a median of 14 months before detection, against 12 months overall — because the output is a list of names, and lists don’t get read.
The far more likely outcome of this check is that you spot a subscription you forgot you were paying for. I’ve had clients find $400 a month in software they stopped using in 2023.
Check 4 — Read the Adjusting Journal Entries
Time: 5 minutes.
Every set of books has journal entries — manual adjustments made outside the normal flow of categorizing transactions. They’re legitimate, and every competent bookkeeper makes them: depreciation, accruals, correcting a prior-month error.
Run the journal entry report. You’re not auditing the math, you’re reading the memo field.
A good entry explains itself to a non-accountant: “Reclass Stripe fees from revenue to merchant fees per September payout report.” A weak entry says “adjustment.” Or “to true up.” Or nothing.
Blank memos are usually deadline pressure rather than anything sinister. Ask anyway, for a reason that has nothing to do with suspicion: an entry nobody can explain in six months is a problem for you, at tax time, when your CPA asks what it was and neither of you knows. “Can you walk me through this $3,200 entry on the 31st?” is a normal question with a one-sentence answer.
Check 5 — Open the Audit Log
Time: 5 minutes, and mostly the first time.
QuickBooks Online keeps an audit log that records essentially everything: sign-ins, transactions created and edited, changes to customers and vendors, settings changes, payroll runs. Deleted transactions stay discoverable. Three things about it are worth knowing.
It can’t be switched off. Intuit’s own documentation says it directly: “For audit and security reasons, you can’t turn off the audit log.”
It requires Admin access to view. This is where most owners have it backwards. If your bookkeeper holds Primary Admin on your QuickBooks file and you don’t, you can’t see the log of what happens in your own books. “Can you transfer Primary Admin to me?” is a request any professional handles without blinking.
Events are retained for two years. A problem running longer than 24 months has already had its earliest activity age out. The Austin scheme ran about six years.
What are you looking for? Not much, honestly, and that’s fine. Filter to deleted and modified transactions. If someone edited a period you’d already closed and reported on, ask — it means your prior reports no longer match the file behind them. Then close the books through your last reconciled month and set a closing password only you know. Xero has an equivalent lock date.
What a Reconciliation Report Should Look Like
You should get a reconciliation report for each account, every month. A real one names the statement ending date and balance, lists cleared and outstanding transactions, and shows a difference of exactly zero. Three things make one meaningless.
It balances by way of a plug. A forced adjustment that makes the difference disappear isn’t a reconciliation, it’s a decision to stop looking. In the ACFE study, 7% of perpetrators concealed by forcing or altering reconciliations — but the far more common cause is simply running out of time. The effect on your numbers is identical.
The statement it reconciles to came from inside the building. See Check 1.
A long tail of stale outstanding items. Checks listed as outstanding for eight months aren’t outstanding. They were never cashed, they were voided, or they never existed — and either way they’re inflating your reported cash.
Why These Five, and Not Fifty
Here’s the finding that shaped this post, and it’s genuinely encouraging. The two highest-performing anti-fraud controls in the entire ACFE study aren’t the expensive ones. Management review — someone in authority actually looking at the results — was associated with a 55% lower median loss ($84,000 where present, $186,000 where absent) and cut median duration from 18 months to 10. Surprise audits — checking something on a day nobody expected — were associated with a 50% lower median loss ($74,000 versus $149,000) and cut duration from 16 months to 8. Both beat having an internal audit department, at 33%.
Neither requires a department, a budget, or a credential. They’re a person looking at things, sometimes without warning. That’s the design principle here: these five checks are management review, run by the only manager a small business has.
And on the ugly statistic about my own profession, I’d rather give it to you straight. Accounting is tied with operations as the most frequent source of occupational fraud, at 13% of cases each — operations actually had slightly more raw cases, 279 to 261. Where accounting stands apart is severity: a $164,000 median loss against operations’ $100,000. Proximity to the money doesn’t make people dishonest. It makes the rare dishonest one more expensive.
The Legal Duty You Didn’t Know You Had
I’m a bookkeeper and a forensic accountant, not an attorney, so take this as general information rather than advice about your situation.
Under the Uniform Commercial Code, which every US state has adopted in some form, you have an affirmative duty as a bank customer to “exercise reasonable care and promptness to examine” your bank statements for unauthorized signatures and alterations. That’s section 4-406, and it’s your obligation — not your bookkeeper’s, and not your bank’s.
The consequence is the part nobody sees coming. A provision often called the same-wrongdoer rule says that failing to report an unauthorized item within a reasonable period can preclude you from asserting subsequent forgeries by the same person. That’s the serial-embezzlement fact pattern exactly: the first altered check goes unreported, and the next thirty become your loss instead of the bank’s.
How long is “a reasonable period”? Be careful with what you read online. The uniform text describes a period “not exceeding 30 days,” and 30 days gets repeated everywhere — but New York’s version uses 14 days, and your deposit agreement can shorten it further. Your real answer is in those two documents, not in a blog post.
None of this should alarm you. Ninety seconds with a bank statement each month satisfies a duty you already have.
How to Run These Checks Without Insulting Someone Who’s Doing Everything Right
This is the objection I hear most, and it’s fair. Nobody wants to signal distrust to someone they depend on. Three things make it easy.
Frame it as your job, not their audit. “I’m building a monthly routine where I actually look at my own numbers” is true, insulting to nobody, and a sentence any professional respects.
Ask questions as questions. “What’s this entry?” is neutral. “Why is there an entry here?” is not. The difference is small and people hear it. Almost every question has a one-sentence answer.
Vary the timing. Some months on the 5th, some on the 20th. Not to set a trap — but a review that lands on a predictable date gets prepared for, and one that lands whenever gets prepared for continuously.
Now the honest part, the one that costs me business. If you run these five checks and everything ties, your bookkeeper is doing a good job and you should keep them. Not switch, not shop around, not read three more posts about warning signs. Most readers will find exactly that, plus one forgotten subscription and a question about a journal entry. A clean month is data, and it should make you more relaxed about your books, not less. And when something doesn’t tie, the odds still overwhelmingly favor an error over anything worse. Ask first.
The one exception — the only place I’d stop being collaborative — is if you can’t get access to your own books, if statements only ever reach you through your bookkeeper, or if the explanations keep changing. Those aren’t capacity problems. Preserve your access, pull your statements from the bank, don’t announce anything, and get a qualified second set of eyes on the file before you make a move.
Everything else is a conversation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Checking Your Bookkeeper’s Work
How do I know if my bookkeeper is doing a good job?
Run the five checks monthly. If cash ties to a statement you pulled yourself, the vendor names are all recognizable, and the journal entries are explained in plain English, your bookkeeper is doing the job.
How often should I check my bookkeeper’s work?
Monthly, once your month-end package arrives, and not on the same date every month. Twenty minutes is enough, plus a deeper look once a year before you hand anything to your tax preparer.
What should I do if I find something that doesn’t match?
Ask, plainly and without accusation. The overwhelming majority of discrepancies are ordinary errors, and a good bookkeeper will explain or correct one quickly. Escalate only if you can’t get access to your own records, if explanations keep shifting, or if statements only ever reach you through your bookkeeper.
How common is bookkeeper fraud, really?
Rare, and worth keeping in proportion. The ACFE figures describe the distribution among businesses that had a fraud, not the odds that yours does. What they do show is that small organizations carry the highest median loss of any size band, at $126,000 — and the same dollar loss hurts a small business far more than a large one.
Does my accountant or CPA already check this?
Not the way most owners assume. Preparing a tax return means working from the books you provide, not testing whether those books reflect reality — and in the ACFE study, external audit was the detection method in only 2% of cases. Tips led at 43%, and management review at 13%. An independent look at the books themselves is a separate engagement you have to ask for.
Twenty Minutes a Month, and You Can Stop Wondering
The reason most owners don’t check their books isn’t laziness. It’s that nobody ever told them what to look at, so opening QuickBooks feels like opening a language you don’t read. Five specific things, in order, fixes that.
Do it this month. Pull the statement, tie the cash, read the vendor names, read the memos, open the audit log. If it all ties — and it probably will — you’ve bought a month of not wondering.
If you’d like a straight second opinion on what’s actually in your books, book a free discovery call. I’ll tell you what I see, including when the honest answer is that your current bookkeeper is doing solid work and you don’t need me.
If you’d rather run the routine yourself, grab the 20-Minute Monthly Books Review — the five checks as a printable checklist, with what a good answer looks like for each one.
And if you have a bookkeeper you trust, tell them you’re starting this. The good ones say some version of “finally.” I know, because I’ve said it.