Risk Management

Finalert builds that register with you and sets up the review rhythm that keeps it alive. We facilitate, document and prepare. Your management team owns every judgment about how much risk to carry and what to do about it, and your external advisers keep their own conclusions.

We cover the risks that sit inside the finance function: cash and liquidity, credit and customer concentration, payment fraud, segregation of duties, vendor dependence, key-person exposure and system access. This is readiness and preparation work. It is not insurance broking, and it is not legal or regulatory advice.

Finalert helps U.S. companies build a finance risk register and then run it. We start from the work your team already does: who can move money, who can change a vendor bank detail, who holds the only copy of the close checklist, which customers owe you the most, and which systems nobody has reviewed access to in two years. Each of those becomes an entry with a plain description, a likelihood score, an impact score, a named owner and a due date. The register is short on purpose, because a list of eighty risks gets read once and never again.

The scoring conversation is where the value sits. Two people who both say a risk is serious will often disagree by a wide margin once they have to put a number on likelihood and a dollar band on impact. That argument is the point. It forces your controller, your operations lead and your CFO to agree what you are actually worried about, in what order, and what you are willing to live with. We facilitate that session, write down what was decided and why, and keep the reasoning attached to the entry so the next review starts where the last one ended.

The risks we work through with you

Financial and liquidity risk comes first: cash runway, covenant headroom, concentration in a single bank, and the working capital swing a slow-paying quarter would cause. Credit risk follows, looking at customer concentration, aging that has quietly drifted, and terms granted by sales without a check. Vendor concentration gets the same treatment, because a sole-source supplier or a single payroll provider is an operational risk that lands on the finance team when it breaks.

Fraud and segregation of duties get their own pass. We map who requests a payment, who approves it, who releases it and who reconciles the bank, and we flag every place one person holds two of those four. Payment fraud is worked as a specific scenario: vendor bank detail changes, urgent wire requests that bypass the normal path, duplicate invoices, payroll changes and expense abuse. Key-person and system-access risks close the sweep, covering admin rights nobody reviews and knowledge that lives with one employee.

How the register stays current

A register decays if it is only touched once a year. We set a cadence instead: a short monthly check on open mitigation items, and a fuller quarterly review where scores are revisited, closed items are retired and new risks are added. Each review produces a dated version, so you can show how your thinking changed. Owners are people, not departments. Some risks are accepted deliberately because the mitigation costs more than the exposure, and that decision is recorded with the name of the person who made it. Writing the choice down is what makes the register usable when a lender or a board member asks how you manage risk.

The limits are worth stating plainly. Finalert provides readiness support and preparation only. We do not perform audits, we do not test controls to support an opinion, and we do not issue audit or attest opinions of any kind. We are not insurance brokers and we do not place cover. We do not give legal or regulatory advice, and we do not act as your accountant of record. Management owns its own assertions about risk and control, your external auditor owns its conclusions, and your attorney owns the legal position. Our job is to help you see the risks clearly, write them down properly and keep them moving.