Appropriate accounting records have been properly kept throughout the financial year.

Overview: what we are looking for here to have some assurance that the Councils basic record keeping was of an adequate standard. We would not normally expect to issue a Negative response for this Box unless the recording keeping was very poor or incomplete.

1.We just need to consider here if the method of accounting seems to be reasonable given the volume of transactions. We may need, for example, to recommend that a Council considers moving from paper to a Spreadsheet or from a Spreadsheet to a formal accounting system.

2. Either it balances or it doesn’t. If it is not possible to balance the accounts then we need to look at a Negative response for Box A. If we had to do additional work to make it balance then we need to raise an Observation “Council to Note”.

3. Hopefully this is obvious, a few errors are OK, a lot of errors is not.

4.Again obvious. If records are poorly kept or not available we should give a No here

5. The link on the checklist is to the requirements of the Local Govt Act 1972. The most common issue found here is pages not being initialled as individual pages need to be initialled in addition to a signature on the final page. We don’t need to check every Minute, but we should have signed Minutes for the setting of the Precept and approval of the Annual Governance Statement and Accounting Statements.