Cash, Controls and Fraud: Alan Spicer on Running a Small Business in a Tough Year

How do you stop someone changing the bank details on an invoice?

Pick up the phone. Alan Spicer’s answer is that before you pay a new bank account, or one that has changed, you call the supplier or customer and confirm the details out loud. Then you check the payment actually landed. Your own systems can be secure and you can still be caught out by someone else’s, so the check has to happen at the point the money moves.

The phone call that stops invoice fraud

Alan described a case from his brother’s business in the Hunter Valley. An invoice went out of Xero. The customer said they had paid it on the spot. Days later, nothing had arrived.

The customer’s email had been compromised, and someone had intercepted the invoice and changed the bank details on it. The payment was recovered, but only because the two of them followed up quickly and actually spoke to each other. Most businesses in that position are not that lucky.

Nothing about the fix is sophisticated. The failure was in the gap between sending an invoice and confirming where the money was going. For the wider set of checks a finance team can put around supplier payments, see our guide to fraud prevention for SME finance teams.

Conserve cash like it’s gold, and price for what you can’t absorb

For the past two years Alan has given business owners the same advice, and he says it has never applied more than it does now: conserve cash like it is precious gold. Cash either creates an opportunity or it stops a bleed.

Pricing is the other half of that. Most of his clients have built in a price increase of at least 5%, because they cannot absorb any more cost until their people, systems and processes are working properly. Wages remain the pressure point. When an owner says they need to put on a CFO, Alan’s first question is whether there is $150,000 in the budget for it, or whether a fractional arrangement at a fraction of that cost gives them what they need while they build the systems underneath.

ATO debt is no longer a cheap overdraft

For years the ATO was effectively the largest lender to small business, and owners treated tax debt like an overdraft. Since July 2025, interest on tax debt is no longer deductible, and Alan says the number of Director Penalty Notices has risen sharply at the same time.

His position is blunt: you cannot ignore it, you have to engage. Plenty of owners are now refinancing ATO debt over a longer term, but Alan’s view is that the refinance is the second step. The first is working out how the debt built up and how it will actually be repaid. That forces a better conversation than rolling the balance forward.

This is general information only, not tax or financial advice. Speak to a qualified adviser about your situation.

You need a process for every way money moves

Alan sees a wide spread of control maturity. At one end are owners who offer to hand over their internet banking password. At the other are businesses with clear approval channels and defined authority limits.

The cost of getting it wrong has gone up. If someone keys in the wrong bank details and sends a $50,000 payment, the chance of recovering it is now close to zero. His advice is that processes do not need to be complicated, but you need one for every way money leaves the business.

Review them at least once a year as part of business planning, and again whenever the team changes: someone joins, someone leaves, a new role is created, or a critical person in a small team goes on holiday. That is usually where controls fail, because the process only ever lived in one person’s head.

Report in a way owners will actually use

Alan reports to owners and boards, and he starts every relationship by asking what information matters to them and how they prefer to receive it. Some people want to know why printing costs went up by $500. Others only want to talk about the sales opportunity that could double revenue and how it gets funded.

He pointed to a not-for-profit with a board that rotated every two years as the hardest version of this. The pack was the same each time; what changed was how each new member wanted to digest it. Some wanted five bullet points, others wanted the full report.

When owners lose confidence in their finances, Alan’s read is that the root cause is usually trust, either in the people doing the work or in a system that is not giving them the answers they need. Both surface as a communication problem. Numbers tell a story, and the job is to tell it clearly enough that the reader can act on it.