The first step of the front office (night) audit is to

• A. Back up the system
• B. Run back up reports
• C. Reconcile accounts
• D. Print reports

Answer: (A)

The primary idea here is protecting data before you do anything else. In the night audit, the day’s financial activity is being closed and tallied, so you want to secure a copy of all that information first. Backing up the system creates a safe restore point: if anything goes wrong during the subsequent steps—data entry, reconciliation, or report generation—you can recover the day’s data without losing transactions or having to redo everything. This safeguards accuracy and integrity, which is why backing up comes first.

Once the backup exists, you can proceed with the other steps (verifying data, generating and printing reports, reconciling accounts) with confidence that you’re working from a solid, unaltered copy. Printing reports before securing that backup could propagate errors or omissions if something needs to be corrected later, and attempting reconciliations or report validation on unbacked data isn’t as reliable.