6 Tips to Improve Finance & Accounting Department Efficiency
In any company, the accounting department will always have a huge responsibility in managing business finances. Incoming and outgoing cash, financial statements, all managed by the department. When your accountants are being slow at work, there will be consequences that could result in losses to your company. As a business owner, it’s so important for you to encourage your staff to be able to work more efficiently. Check out these useful tips.
1. Train your staff.
The first step to take is to ensure that the people in charge of your accounts are really proficient. They must be able to adapt to both financial procedures and any accounting software that have been used by your company. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you conduct training to optimize your finance team performance.
There are different types of training you can provide, such as in-house seminars, external conferences, one-on-one training, and more. Cross-training is also needed to cover up the gaps in your accounting department, especially when an accountant is sick, on vacation, or leaves without notice. When this situation happens, another employee who has been cross-trained can step in to temporarily handle the financial tasks.
2. Establish effective policies.
Indiscipline in financial management is one of the biggest money wasters for companies. Thus, it is very essential for your company to create policies and deadlines regarding any payment. Ask your finance staff to process all the payments, including salaries and contracts in a timely manner.
You also need to pay attention to your customer payments. Ask your staff to send reminders to your customers or clients before their invoices become past due. By complying with established policies, your finance staff will be able to easily manage your business cash flow and submit complete financial statements each month.
3. Improve collaboration between departments.
Your finance and accounting department can’t run on their own and they often rely on other departments for their financial data. Requesting data from each department manually is very time consuming. To improve efficiency, we recommend that you allow all departments in your company to use a shared system. A Cloud-based ERP software can help your company integrate all the departments, thus allowing your finance department to get complete data from each department in a matter of seconds.
4. Use batch payment processing.
Processing every single invoice or receipt that comes one at a time is very inefficient. To save time and effort, make sure your finance staff consolidate all the invoices and process them simultaneously. Therefore, ask all your staff to submit their invoices or claims for reimbursement at a designed time so that the finance staff can process it all at the same time.
5. Automate manual processes.
In this technological era, manual accounting which takes a long time should have been abandoned. In order for your finance department to be able to work more efficiently, provide an accounting system that serves to automate their complex tasks. The system allows your finance staff to generate reports, calculate profits and losses, create invoices, record and save transaction details, manage taxes and many more in just a few clicks. By automating a lot of manual work, your finance staff can focus more on other important jobs.
6. Communicate well with your team.
Communicating your expectations of your accounting department from the outset will give your finance team clarity on what they should do. Explain the policies and procedures your company has established up front so that they will always comply with them. Be open to their helpful advice and opinions, especially if they are truly experts in finance.
Also read: Easy Steps to Create a Profit & Loss (Income) Statement