Internal Controls & Risk
Stronger Controls for a Business That Is Growing Faster Than Its Processes
5th Quadrant helps growing businesses replace informal, person-dependent practices with documented, testable financial and operational controls.
Less leakage, clearer accountability, and safer scaling.
Sound familiar?
Warning signs
- One person can create, approve and pay a transaction.
- Access rights are never revoked after a role changes.
- Management learns about errors far too late to act.
- Approvals happen informally, with no evidence trail.
- Policies exist on paper but are never actually tested.
Control design
- Process risk assessment.
- A risk and control matrix.
- Segregation of duties.
- An approval and delegation-of-authority matrix.
- Maker-checker and exception controls.
- System and access controls.
Testing and improvement
- Walkthroughs and design review.
- Operating-effectiveness testing.
- Exception reporting.
- Corrective-action design.
- Retesting and closure.
Governance outputs
- A risk register.
- A management control dashboard.
- Named owner and reviewer for each control.
- A quarterly control-certification workflow.
- Board or management reporting.
5th Quadrant designs, documents and tests internal financial controls. A statutory auditor's opinion on internal financial controls, where required, is issued independently by the company's appointed statutory auditor.
What You Receive
- Risk register.
- Risk and control matrix.
- Delegation-of-authority and approval matrix.
- Segregation-of-duties review.
- Control testing report.
- Corrective-action tracker.
Ask us about our Finance Controls Self-Assessment when you get in touch.
Proof and trust
Built to Be Verified, Not Just Trusted
We're building out anonymised sample deliverables and case studies for this service. Ask us for examples relevant to your industry when you get in touch, and we'll walk you through our review controls and reporting frequency directly.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are internal financial controls?
The policies and procedures that make sure transactions are authorised, recorded accurately and protected from error or misuse — things like approval limits, segregation of duties, and reconciliation checks.
Does every small business need documented controls?
Not on day one, but the need grows quickly with headcount, locations or transaction volume. We assess where you are and recommend controls proportionate to your current stage, not a generic heavy framework.
What is segregation of duties?
Making sure no single person can both create and approve the same transaction end-to-end — for example, the person raising a payment shouldn't also be the one approving it.
Can controls be built without slowing the business down?
Yes — the goal is controls that fit how the business actually operates. Overly rigid controls that get bypassed in practice are worse than no controls at all, so we design for what your team will actually follow.
What is the difference between control design and testing?
Design is building the right control for the risk. Testing checks whether that control is actually being followed in practice — the two are separate steps, and we do both.
Can 5th Quadrant issue the statutory auditor's IFC opinion?
No. Any statutory auditor's opinion on internal financial controls must be issued by the company's eligible statutory auditor. We can document and test controls to make that audit smoother.