Your finance department is responsible for managing your company’s finances. Staff need to handle incoming and outgoing cash, financial statements and more to ensure your business remains profitable. When your finance department operates inefficiently, your business may lose money. As a result, you want to ensure your staff are working at maximum performance. Here are six ways to lighten your team’s workload while increasing efficiency.
Conduct Process Walk-Throughs
Meet with financial process owners and process participants in every department to obtain a thorough understanding of the end-to-end process. Question whether every step, piece of paper, input and output is necessary and why. You may ask whether each step adds value, is labor intensive and can be either automated or eliminated. If you uncover inefficient, unnecessary work, improve it. Repeat the process annually to continue uncovering weak points in a department or the business. Focus on making processes more efficient AND more effective.
Take Advantage of Unused System Functionality
Midsize to large financial software packages often include functions your team does not use. Training your staff to use all the functions may eliminate ongoing work and free up time for higher-value activities. Read the vendor-provided documentation to understand which functionality is included and how to use it, then train your team on what you learned. Or, invest in a trainer to share their system expertise with your team.
Develop System Experts
Determine which team members understand systems work and want to become department experts. They may be adept at creating queries, writing detailed reports, responding to routine questions or other functions that benefit accountants. Partner with your IT department to implement a one- or two-day training plan for your experts.
Implement Best Practices
Use best financial practices that focus on regularity, consistency, continuity and recording sales when they are certain. Your department may reduce your accountants’ workload and increase employee morale. You also may improve accuracy, cycle time, response time, data quality and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. Learn about best practices through reading, researching, discussing and learning from thought leaders and participating in financing events.
Use Process Metrics
Implement process metrics to measure your finance department’s productivity. Make sure the metrics are easily understood and available to all team members. For instance, accounts payable process metrics may include number of invoices processed, number of check requests processed or number of lines of data entered into the system. Metrics also may include number of recurring payments, number of incoming voucher errors or missing or incorrect account coding. Use your process metrics to compare activity to previous periods or externally as a benchmark for other organizations.
Reward Success
Recognize your financial analysts’ efforts to improve departmental efficiency. Individual and group praise, along with monetary incentives, provide additional encouragement to improve.
Make Your Finance Department More Efficient
Increase your finance department’s efficiency by walking through your processes, taking advantage of more software systems, and developing an expert to train on and answer questions about the software. Implement best practices and use process metrics to increase your team’s output, measure results, and improve as needed. You’ll be streamlining processes and increasing efficiency to improve performance.