Office Money: What an Administrator Looks After

Most office money is not handled by the finance department. It is handled in the office itself, by an administrator, an office manager or a personal assistant. Someone keeps a small box of cash for taxis and courier fees. Someone checks that the stationery bill stays inside the amount agreed for the year. Someone collects colleagues’ receipts after a business trip and sends them for repayment.

The sums are usually small. The responsibility is not. Office money is real money belonging to the organisation, and the person who looks after it must be able to show, at any time, where every amount went. A missing receipt for a few dollars can damage trust as much as a large error, because it suggests that the system is not working.

Where this course fits

This course is for people who look after office money day to day. It does not teach accounting entries (debits and credits), company-wide budgeting or buying from suppliers. Those subjects have their own courses: Bookkeeping and Double Entry, Budgeting and Forecasting and Office Procurement and Supplies. Here you learn the practical routine: how to run petty cash, how to check an expense claim, and how to prepare and follow an office budget.

One rule stands above everything in this course: your organisation’s own policy comes first. Limits, forms and approval rules differ between organisations and between countries. Where this course gives a figure, it is an invented teaching example unless it says otherwise.