January 7, 2011
By Ingrid Zacharias
Recently I received a letter from a reader with a question about non-profits and online banking. He asked me if I had any policies concerning online banking.
I began to respond to his email and then thought that there are probably a lot of other people out there contemplating this same issue. So I decided to write a blog post about it. In fact, this will be the first of a series of blog posts on this topic.
If your non-profit is considering doing some of your banking online, then there are things that you need in place to be able to make this happen. They are:
- A policy in place – You should have a written policy on how the organization’s debit card may be used and by whom.
- Checks and balances – Ensure you have put the appropriate checks and balances in place in your procedures to reduce your organization’s risk.
- Assigning responsibility – The person entrusted with the responsibility for the debit card must be totally trustworthy. In fact, I would even recommend you do a criminal records check on them to make sure there is no history of previous fraud or embezzlement.
- Assigning authorization privileges – Whoever you entrust with responsibility for the debit card, should not be the same person that you give the authority to authorize use for individual transactions. The person given the authority to authorize transactions should be the Executive Director, who ultimately is responsible for all transactions by the organization anyway.
Question of the Day: What other things do you think need to be in place before it is safe for a non-profit to consider doing online banking?
