Integrating Quality Assurance into your Company’s Internal Controls

For most, the key to the success of their company lies in constantly being able to pursue avenues for continuous growth. However, while this is a healthy mindset, it is important to note that before you go for company growth initiatives such as expansion, you should first make sure that your internal controls are running efficiently with quality assurance at its core.  

Read: People Management: How to Handle a Growing Workforce 

The Importance of Integration 

A company’s internal controls serve as the guiding processes, rules and regulations that employees and departments are expected to adhere to, to make sure that everyone is aligned in working towards a common goal. This encompasses not just each department and team’s everyday workflow but how we navigate crisis and mitigate other risks.  

By integrating quality assurance in the implementation of a company’s internal controls, you are cementing the foundation of your company. Quality assurance at the root paves the way for quality services and quality outputs, which in turn guarantees a smooth and pleasant working experience for your employees as well as a healthy collaborative environment for your clients.  

How We Do It  

At D&V Philippines, our Quality Assurance department assesses both our internal controls and processes as well as all our client-facing efforts to make sure that all company efforts are aligned with our standards. In line with this, we make sure to employ the following:  

Employing Strategic Planning and Enterprise Risk Management Strategies   

Our Quality Assurance team's approach to assessing the quality of our processes and deciding what to retain and improve comes with comprehensive planning and analysis. First, we conduct strategic planning to set the direction of the company – defining the goals and objectives of the company and creating an actionable plan on how each department can work towards the goals that have been set.  

As we create an action plan, we make sure we employ enterprise risk management strategies to manage risks across the entire company, looking into and evaluating the said potential risks that may hinder or affect us in reaching the company’s goals and objectives, preparing us to be able to navigate such situations and remain on track with our goals regardless of the risks and proactively creating solutions even before a problem occurs.  

Conducting Routine Internal Audits  

We then conduct routine internal audits both within our administrative departments and operations department. We do this to evaluate our internal controls which encompass corporate governance policies and processes throughout the organization to make sure that the standards created to streamline our workflow and make sure transparency and efficiency is maintained in everything we do is upheld and relevant to the company’s current needs and structure.  

We also audit our operations department according to standard operating processes set after a thorough assessment of our services and service delivery process along with integration of clients’ feedback. By auditing both aspects routinely, we are making sure that our administrative departments and operations work together, complimenting each other with their front-end and back-end tasks which results in joint success and an aligned company.  

Integration of Feedback  

At the very heart of our operations lies the prioritization of client success and satisfaction. Because of this, we have set up channels for clients from all stages – onboarding, engagement and disengagement, to give their feedback regarding their experience and note any points of improvement.   

We then take these points of improvements to heart and use them to assess our current process, create solutions and integrate the feedback in our improvement of service delivery. By incorporating the feedback of our clients, we are not only building a long-lasting relationship but ensuring that our operations remain adaptable and able to tailor our services according to each client’s needs.  

Adaptable Emergency Protocols  

Aside from our routine audits, D&V Philippines also has the necessary protocols in place to be able to deal with sudden changes such as the economic turbulence brought by the COVID-19 lockdown, natural disaster or social and political occurrences. For situations like this, our business continuity process is immediately taken into effect with an emergency response committee ready to deal with the sudden change and implement protocols to make sure our operations are not affected.  

Knowing that the nature of possible emergencies has changed over time, our quality assurance also makes sure we assess our business continuity protocols and update it yearly so that it remains timely and relevant, able to mitigate current possible risks and emergencies.  

Commitment to Continuous Improvement  

As we have grown exponentially over the past few years with now having more than one thousand employees, both expanding our reach to overseas clients as well as expanding our support to cover extensive finance and accounting needs, we make sure that our quality assessment protocols also grow alongside these initiatives.  

To make sure our quality grows as our operations do, we have adopted a fact-finding approach when it comes to assessing our points for improvements. Instead of assigning blame, finding fault and focusing on the negatives, we take a step back and holistically assess all our internal controls to identify how to improve them, maintaining the quality our clients have come to expect from us as we continue to expand.  

Having said this, while we value thorough standardized controls, policies and procedures and make sure that we integrate a fact-finding approach in developing our processes, we also prioritize efficiency throughout it all – making sure that our decision-making process is quick yet thorough, able to handle all changes and implement swift action as needed, staying flexible and adaptable to what both our company and our client needs. 

D&V Philippines makes sure that our quality assurance efforts are not only centered on creating new processes that would aid in our growth ventures but also in updating and continuously improving the processes and systems we do have. We make it a priority that how we operate remains competitive and able to integrate the latest in finance and accounting technology and relevant strategic planning and risk analysis trends, allowing us to build our services from the ground up with true quality assurance at the core. 

Read Next: Spearheading Change: How to Direct your Company’s Growth 

Need Quality Accounting Support? 
 

D&V Philippines provides scalable finance and accounting solutions that can adapt to any landscape. If you’re interested in learning more about our services, schedule a free consultation with us or download our Employees to Partners whitepaper to see how we value our talents! 

This article has been written in collaboration with Aly Tagamolila, a content specialist at D&V Philippines.