Money Management: Better Business Ideas for Your Accounting Department

Brooke Chaplan

September 17, 2013

	Not rated
	Rate:

One of the most important, yet frequently undervalued, aspects of any business is the accounting department. When it comes to making smart uses of money, businesses should place more value in the services that they can provide, and should look for ways to make the departments more effective and efficient. There are several things that all businesses can do to make their finance and accounting departments work more efficiently.

Conduct a Process Audit

The first step of making your accounting department more efficient is to create a process audit of the department. This process can be completed by either someone internally that works in another department, or a third party consulting firm. During the process, you will need to be able to find areas that inefficient, such as people that are doing redundant work, or processes that are too time consuming and unnecessary.

Formulate a Plan for Change

Once you have gone through the process of finding what needs to be changed, the next thing you need to do is formulate a plan for change. For example, if you have found that multiple employees are completing the same tasks on a regular basis, it would be wise to have the amount of time that is spent doing those tasks reduced by having less employees focus on it. Employees could then spend more of their time on value-add work, either in the accounting department or elsewhere. Try to make a plan that sounds reasonable to everyone.

Train Employees in New Systems in Practices

If, during your audit and plan formulation process, you noticed new systems and processes that need to be implemented or touched on, the next thing that you will need to do is train all of the accountants on the new processes. Accounting processes need to be incredibly precise. This will include several hours of formal training so they can learn and understand the new processes and requirements. You will be able to gather all of the employees at once to ensure that they all receive the training, and will also provide a chance for the employees to ask questions. Make sure everyone is on the same page with new procedures and can preform them properly and up to speed.

Establish Goals and Process Metrics

Most importantly, you need to develop a way of tracking employee progress to ensure that they are working efficiently and following all of the new policies. Each employee should be given some performance based goals, which future compensation can be dependent on. The performance goals should not be subjective, and should be made clear to all employees ahead of time.

When your accounting and other departments are functioning up to speed, they are increasing the productivity of your company. If your new plan takes some financing, consider getting an El Paso Power Finance loan to build company credit and fund new procedure and training. Soon your company will be humming along with the help of a new and improved accounting department.