This assessment identifies financial blind spots by providing a personalized risk score and actionable recommendations.
A fraud vulnerability assessment is a structured review of the controls your business has in place to prevent, detect, and respond to fraud. It examines how you pay vendors, collect from customers, manage employee spending, and maintain oversight at each step.The goal is to identify where your processes are weakest—the places where a fraudulent transaction, manipulated invoice, or unauthorized payment could slip through.
Fraud doesn't usually announce itself. The most damaging schemes tend to be quiet, incremental, and designed to look like normal business operations. That's what makes them so effective, and so difficult to catch without the right controls.Consider a few realities that catch businesses off guard.Most fraud is internal. The 2026 ACFE Report to the Nations analyzed over 2,400 cases of occupational fraud worldwide. According to that report, CFEs estimate that organizations lose roughly 5% of revenue to fraud each year, and the median loss per case in the study was $104,000. The average loss, however, was $1,457,000. About 20% of cases in the study had losses of over $1M. A typical fraud case lasted 12 months before detection. [1]These aren't sophisticated cyberattacks from the outside. They're billing schemes, expense manipulation, and check tampering carried out by people who understand the gaps in their approval and payment systems.Check fraud is still rampant. According to the 2026 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey, 76% of organizations experienced attempted or actual payments fraud in 2025, and checks remained the payment method most frequently targeted, with 58% of organizations reporting check fraud. [2]Small businesses are disproportionately vulnerable. Larger companies tend to have dedicated fraud prevention teams, formal reporting hotlines, and layered approval processes. Small and mid-size businesses often don't. Analysis of the 2026 ACFE report found that only 25% of small businesses have a formal whistleblowing mechanism in place, compared to 85% of large organizations, even though tips remain the single most effective method for detecting fraud, uncovering 43% of cases in the 2026 study. [1][3]The uncomfortable truth is that most fraud isn't caught by audits or software. It's caught because someone noticed something off and said something. If your business doesn't have the controls that make noticing and reporting possible, you're relying on luck.
After completing the assessment, you'll receive a score that reflects the strength of your current fraud controls across three areas: accounts payable, accounts receivable, and spend and expense management.Low risk doesn't mean no risk. It means you have foundational controls in place—things like segregation of duties, approval workflows, and regular reconciliation. You're not immune to fraud, but you've made it significantly harder for a bad actor to succeed without being detected. Focus on maintaining your controls and reviewing them periodically as your business grows or processes change.Moderate risk means there are meaningful gaps. You may have strong controls in one area but weak ones in another—solid AP approval workflows, for instance, but limited visibility into employee spending. These gaps create opportunities that a determined fraudster can exploit. The recommendations that accompany your score will point you toward the highest-priority fixes.High risk means your business lacks several critical controls. This doesn't mean fraud is occurring right now, but it does mean the conditions that allow fraud to happen undetected are present. If one person can create a vendor, approve an invoice, and issue payment without a second set of eyes, that's a high-risk process regardless of how much you trust the person doing it. Prioritize the recommendations in your results and consider a more thorough internal audit.
Certain patterns show up again and again in businesses that have experienced fraud. If any of these sound familiar, they're worth addressing, and the assessment above can help you quantify how exposed you are.One person controls too much of the financial process. When the same employee enters invoices, approves payments, and reconciles bank statements, there's no natural checkpoint. Segregation of duties is the most fundamental fraud control, and the one most often missing in small businesses.Paper checks are still the default payment method. Checks expose your bank account number on every payment, can be intercepted in the mail, and are relatively easy to alter or forge. The AFP found that checks were the payment method most frequently impacted by fraud in 2025, with 58% of organizations reporting check fraud. [2] Yet many businesses continue using them without protections like positive pay.Vendor information changes go unverified. Business email compromise (BEC) schemes often start with a fraudulent email requesting a change to a vendor's bank account details. If your team processes those changes without verifying them through a trusted channel, you're exposed to one of the most common fraud tactics in operation today. [4]Expense reports are approved on trust. Without clear policies, receipt requirements, and regular audits, expense fraud can be as simple as submitting the same charge twice or inflating mileage. These are small-dollar schemes individually, but they compound over time.Reconciliation happens too infrequently. The longer the gap between the moment a transaction occurs and the time someone reviews it, the more room fraud has to grow. Monthly reconciliation is a minimum; for high-volume businesses, more frequent reviews are significantly safer.Ready to see where your business stands? Take the fraud vulnerability assessment to get your personalized risk score and recommendations. And when you're ready to close the gaps, see how BILL can help.
Not all vulnerabilities carry equal weight. If you're going to focus your attention, start with these three. They're the most common entry points for fraud in accounts payable, accounts receivable, and spend management.1. Accounts payable: No separation between who approves and who paysAP fraud accounts for some of the largest losses businesses face because the amounts involved—vendor payments, contractor invoices, recurring services—tend to be substantial. When one person or a small group controls the entire process from invoice receipt to payment execution, the opportunity for ghost vendors, inflated invoices, and redirected payments is wide open.What to look for:
2. Accounts receivable: Limited visibility into incoming paymentsAR fraud is often overlooked because businesses focus on the money going out. But skimming, lapping schemes, and unauthorized write-offs can drain revenue just as effectively. If your business doesn't track the full lifecycle of a receivable from invoice to payment to deposit, gaps can go unnoticed for months.What to look for:
3. Spend and expense: No real-time controls on employee spendingCorporate cards and expense accounts are necessary tools, but without guardrails they become fraud vectors. The most effective spend controls don't just catch problems after the fact—they prevent unauthorized spending from happening in the first place by setting budgets, enforcing policies automatically, and requiring documentation at the point of purchase.What to look for:
A high risk score is a signal, not a verdict. It means there are specific, fixable gaps in your controls, and addressing them doesn't necessarily require a massive overhaul. Start with the changes that close the biggest exposures first.Separate duties immediately. If one person currently handles the full payment cycle, redistribute responsibilities so that the person who enters invoices is not the person who approves or issues payment. Even in a small team, you can create a simple two-person check on every payment.Move away from paper checks where possible. Digital payments through a secure platform reduce the risks associated with check theft, mail fraud, and altered checks. When checks are necessary, use positive pay to verify each one against your records before the bank clears it.Verify vendor changes through a second channel. Make it a policy that any change to vendor banking information must be confirmed with a phone call to a known contact—not the number provided in the email requesting the change.Implement approval workflows. Require a second approval for payments above a defined threshold. This introduces the oversight that prevents single points of failure.Review your results from the assessment above and tackle the recommendations in order. They're prioritized by impact, so working through them sequentially will close your most significant gaps first.
Internal controls are the policies, procedures, and systems that make fraud harder to commit and easier to detect. No single control is sufficient on its own. Effective fraud prevention comes from layering multiple controls to close the gaps in AP systems.Segregation of duties ensures that no single person controls an entire financial process. At a minimum, the person who authorizes a transaction should be different from the person who records it and the person who has custody of the related assets.Approval workflows require one or more additional people to review and authorize transactions before they're processed. The most effective workflows are configurable—different dollar thresholds, different approvers for different departments, escalation paths for unusual transactions.Audit trails create a permanent, unalterable record of every action taken in a financial process—who did what, when, and what changed. A good audit trail makes it nearly impossible to manipulate records without leaving evidence.Regular reconciliation compares your internal records against external sources (bank statements, vendor confirmations, customer records) to identify discrepancies. The more frequently you reconcile, the faster you catch problems.Access controls restrict who can see and do what within your financial systems. Role-based permissions ensure that employees only have access to the functions they need for their job—nothing more.Automated monitoring uses technology to flag anomalies in real time: duplicate invoice numbers, payments to new vendors that haven't been verified, spending that exceeds preset limits, transactions outside normal patterns. Automation catches things humans miss, especially at scale.
Positive pay is a fraud prevention service that verifies checks before your bank clears them. When you issue a check, your bank receives a file with the check number, date, dollar amount, and account number. When that check is presented for payment, the bank compares it against the file. If the details don't match, the bank flags the check and contacts you for verification before releasing funds. [5]It's one of the most effective defenses against check fraud—including altered checks, forged checks, and checks created from stolen account information. Variations include reverse positive pay (where the bank sends you the list to review rather than matching it automatically) and payee positive pay (which also verifies the payee name, not just the amount and check number). There's also ACH positive pay, which applies the same concept to electronic transactions by matching incoming ACH debits against a pre-approved list. [5]If your business issues checks of any kind, positive pay is worth implementing. The cost is typically modest relative to the protection it provides. And if you use BILL for accounts payable, positive pay is built in—BILL automatically applies it to checks sent through the platform, so you get the protection without a separate setup or bank enrollment. [6]For a deeper look at how positive pay works and whether it's right for your business, visit BILL's Positive Pay guide.
Many of the controls described in this article—segregation of duties, approval workflows, audit trails, digital payments, positive pay—are exactly what the BILL platform is designed to provide. Rather than building these controls manually through policies and spreadsheets, BILL builds them into the way your business pays and gets paid.Customizable approval workflows let you define who needs to approve what, based on dollar amount, vendor, department, or any combination. You control the rules; BILL enforces them automatically. [7]Role-based access controls ensure that the person entering a bill isn't the same person approving or paying it. Every user gets individual login credentials with permissions tailored to their role—no shared passwords, no unnecessary access. [7]A complete, unalterable audit trail logs every action across the platform—who created an invoice, who approved it, who paid it, when, and from which account. That trail is always available for internal reviews, vendor inquiries, or formal audits. [7]Digital payments through a secure network of more than 8 million members reduce reliance on paper checks. When checks are necessary, BILL sends them through a clearing account so your bank information stays private, and applies positive pay automatically. [6]AI-powered risk assessment monitors transactions for patterns that may indicate fraudulent activity, adding a layer of automated detection on top of your process-based controls. [6]Real-time spend controls through BILL Spend & Expense let you set budgets, enforce spending policies, and require documentation at the point of purchase—not weeks later on an expense report. Managers get real-time visibility into team spending, and the platform flags anomalies automatically.The assessment above shows you where your vulnerabilities are. BILL helps you close them—not by adding more work to your plate, but by making stronger controls the default way your business handles money.
The information provided on this page does not, and is not intended to constitute legal or financial advice and is for general informational purposes only. The content is provided "as-is"; no representations are made that the content is error-free.
[1] ACFE Press Release: Occupational Fraud 2026: A Report to the Nations: "This year's edition examines 2,402 cases of occupational fraud investigated by Certified Fraud Examiners (CFEs) across 143 countries." / "CFEs estimate that 5% of revenue is lost to fraud each year." / "The median fraud loss per case in the study was $104,000, but the average loss per case was $1,457,000. 20% of cases in the study had losses of more than $1 million." / "A typical fraud case lasted 12 months before detection. In this year's study, 43% of frauds were detected after a tip was reported, and more than half of those tips came from employees."
[2] 2026 AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey Report: "payments fraud remains widespread, with 76% of organizations reporting they experienced attempted or actual fraud in 2025." / "In 2025, 58% of organizations reported check fraud, outpacing ACH fraud and wire fraud."
[3] What the ACFE Report to the Nations 2026 Tells Us About Stopping Fraud — Report It Now Global: "While 85% of large organisations have an established whistleblowing mechanism in place, only 25% of small businesses do." / "For the fourteenth consecutive study, tips remain the number one method for detecting occupational fraud. In 2026, 43% of cases were uncovered this way — nearly three times more than the next most common method (internal audit at 15%)."
[4] How to prevent accounts payable fraud schemes — BILL: "Always verify any changes in vendor information, such as bank account details or contact information, through multiple channels. Never rely solely on email communication for such sensitive information."
[5] Positive Pay 101: A Guide to Preventing Payment Fraud — BILL: "Positive pay works by comparing the check date, dollar amount, check number, and account number with the details in the check-issue file. If they don't match up, the bank won't clear the check until the business verifies it." / "Reverse positive and payee positive pay are variations of traditional positive pay designed to prevent fraudulent check payments. ACH positive pay is a variation of positive pay designed to prevent fraudulent ACH transactions."
[6] Security and Data Protection — BILL: "Keep bank account information private by making digital payments through a secure network of more than 8 million on BILL." / "BILL sends checks through a clearing account, so your own account remains hidden, and applies the kind of advanced payment protections that most banks charge for, like Positive Pay." / "Unlike other AP platforms that use third-party services to issue payments, BILL Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable keeps your payment processing in-house."
[7] Security — BILL: "Enforce separation of duties with role-based access that lets you control who can enter, approve, and pay bills." / "Automatically keep a record of all AP activity with a timestamped audit trail that cannot be altered, including original bills, review notes, approvals, payments, and remittance details for each transaction." / "BILL's approval customizations help you reduce potential fraud by allowing you to control which bills need approval, by whom, and when, based on business need."