How can you securely manage financial documents within an accounting system?

A good accounting system should have features such as encryption, backup, audit trail, user authentication, and access control. Encryption ensures that your data is unreadable by anyone who does not have the key to decrypt it. Backup allows you to restore your data in case of a disaster or a human error. Audit trail records all the transactions and changes made to your data, so you can track who did what and when.

How can you securely manage financial documents within an accounting system? 1) Financial data security best practices: Whether your business operates online or offline, business data security must be given importance to keep your business safe and afloat. 2) Prioritize data security: You know how crucial financial data security is to your business. Prioritise that at any cost then other accounting and economic aspects. 3) Check your credit report and bank activity regularly: Regularly monitor your credit card activity and quarterly or monthly credit report to notice anomalies. 4) Safeguard Your Relationships with Suppliers: Choose your suppliers wisely and select payment methods that are not only convenient but secure too.

This will help you to find, retrieve, and update your documents easily and efficiently. You can organize your financial documents by using folders, subfolders, labels, tags, categories, or other methods that suit your needs. For example, you can create folders for different types of documents, such as invoices, receipts, reports, statements, etc.

You can organise your documents digitally by keeping track record of your mails and tasks .This can be in form of folders or categorise emails according to specific tasks that need to be executed.further more it’s advisable to chunk the tasks you done with to another specific folder (only executed tasks) so that you can reuse the space.

Document retention policies should be considered as part of your organisation's overall strategy per requirements such as ISO27001 to help shape your internal information system framework. In terms of modern file solutions such as Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive/SharePoint/Teams, they tend to include OCR to detect images and documents for keywords defined in the policy for automated application of retention policies to said files. You can discuss with your IT Team and various stakeholders across multiple business units to define the necessary automated policies for the different kinds of users' day to day work.

A document retention policy specifies how long you should keep your financial documents, and how you should dispose of them when they are no longer needed. Keeping your financial documents for too long or too short can expose you to legal risks, compliance issues, or storage costs. Therefore, you should follow the document retention policy and delete or shred your financial documents when they reach their expiration date.

Internal threats are the risks posed by your own employees or contractors who may misuse, leak, or steal your financial data. External threats are the risks posed by hackers, cybercriminals, or competitors who may try to breach your system and access your financial data. To protect your financial documents from threats, you should implement security measures such as passwords, firewalls, antivirus software, encryption, and VPNs. Passwords should be strong, unique, and changed regularly.

Your staff should be aware of the importance of protecting your financial data, and the consequences of failing to do so. They should also know how to use your accounting system and its security features, and how to follow the document retention policy. They should also know how to avoid common security risks, such as phishing, ransomware, social engineering, or insider threats.