It is hard sometimes in a small bank to maintain lines of independence for certain tasks. Deposit Manager now operates a teller drawer part of the day, pretty much everyday. Now at the request of management, she is dividing up some of her duties. She was going to give the daily cash balancing to one of the tellers. I didn't think this was a good idea at first, but really she's a teller herself so do we need someone in a completely different department to do the daily balancing or is it ok for a teller to perform this task? Perhaps a way to decrease the risk would be for someone else to randomly do the balancing??? Who usually performs this task in other banks?

Segregation of duties is always a challenge in a small bank. Tell you bank asset size and the size of your accounting department. For instance the cash reconciliation is performed in our accounting department but we are a 1.6 billion dollar bank.

We are only 125 million dollar bank. We don't really have an accounting department. We have a "head cashier" or chief operations officer that does payroll and also make sure the bank is in balance (GL accounts). That is the closest we have to an accounting department!
Anyone else care to comment on who performs the cash reconciliation?

We're $56MM - our cashier handles it, but she doesn't run a drawer all that often. Occasionally she will if we're short staffed or incredibly busy.

One way to address the separation of duties in small banks is if you are going to have your Deposit Manager do the random cash counts then just have someone up the food-chain randomly pick a day to audit the Deposit Manager's drawer. Same for other duties, if you are giving it to someone that may have a conflict of interest just implement a random check of their work at random intervals.

Ok. Sounds good. Thanks for the feedback.