You've Earned the Cash. Now Protect It.

Cash management doesn't finish when the money lands in the account. There's a final part that gets far less attention than winning work or chasing invoices, and it's the part that decides whether the cash you've earned stays where you put it.

This isn't about building a corporate control framework. Most of what follows takes an afternoon, once, and a short review a couple of times a year.

Start with access

The first question is simply who can see and move the money.

• Who currently has access to the business bank account?
• Does each of them still need it, for what they do today?
• Is anyone on the list who has left, changed role, or was added for a one-off reason years ago?
• Does anyone share a login, a card or a device with someone else?

Access tends to accumulate. It's added when someone needs it and almost never removed when they don't. A twice-yearly look down the list catches most of it.

Separate creating a payment from approving one

In a business of two or three people, full separation isn't always practical — but partial separation usually is. Someone prepares the payment; someone else releases it. Even if that second person is you, glancing at the payee and the amount before it goes, the check is worth having.

Where separation genuinely isn't possible, a compensating habit helps: review the outgoing payments list once a week against what you expected to pay. It takes two minutes and it's how unfamiliar payments get noticed.

The one that catches good businesses: changed bank details

An email arrives from a supplier you've paid for years. Same name, same tone, new account details for future invoices. It is one of the most common and most effective ways money leaves small businesses, and it works because it looks entirely ordinary.

The control is simple and non-negotiable: never change supplier bank details from an emailed instruction. Call the supplier on the number you already hold — not one in the email — and confirm with a person you know. Then make the first payment small if you can, and check it landed.

Limits, alerts and the boring settings

• Are payment limits set at a level that reflects how the business actually pays — high enough to work, low enough to matter?
• Who receives alerts from the bank for large or unusual payments? Is it someone who reads them?
• Are authentication devices, card readers and codes kept securely rather than in a shared drawer?
• Are banking credentials stored somewhere sensible, and not written down where anyone passing can see them?

Bank alerts are the cheapest control available and the most commonly ignored. A notification for every payment above a threshold you choose costs nothing and gives you a real-time view of money leaving.

When someone leaves

Departures are the moment when access, devices and knowledge all move at once, and they're usually handled emotionally rather than procedurally. Write down a short list now — accounts, cards, logins, authentication devices, alert recipients, anything in a shared password manager — so that when it happens you're working from a checklist rather than memory.

The question most businesses have never asked

What would happen if you temporarily lost access to your main bank account? An outage, a security lock, a lost device, an issue with the one person who holds the credentials.

You don't need a contingency plan in a folder. You need to have thought about it once: is there a second account with a modest balance? Does more than one person know how to reach the bank? Could payroll be paid another way if the main route was unavailable for three days?

For most small businesses the honest answer is no, and the fix is small — a secondary account, a second authorised person, a note of the bank's business support number kept somewhere other than the account you can't get into.

Proportionate is the word to hold on to

None of this requires policies, sign-off matrices or software. It requires a list of who can move money, a rule about changed bank details, a few alerts switched on and a review twice a year.

You've done the difficult part already by earning the cash. Keeping it should be the easy part.