How to Perfect Your Accounting Workflow

The success of your business highly depends on the efficiency of the accounting department. This is why it is imperative to perfect your accounting workflow.

Perfect Your Accounting Workflow – Overview

It isn’t surprising accounting departments are not also efficient. A solid accounting workflow requires you to handle numerous documents and follow several steps that will help you keep track of everything. And with accountants nowadays given more duties than ever before, workflow efficiency is a must for them to achieve. Otherwise, your company’s performance will be negatively affected.

If you lack ideas on how to boost the efficiency of your business, you’ve come to the right place. In this guide we detail 5 practices you can implement to perfect your accounting workflow in your company.

Create And Define Your Workflow

You can’t perfect your accounting workflow without first refining your internal workflow as a whole. This is essential as the workflow is a system that allows you to have processes or tasks completed in an orderly and systematic way.

With clearly laid out processes in place, for instance when it comes to sending or receiving fax online, you’ll be able to establish a suitable groundwork for improved operations within your company. In addition, this would help increase the transparency between stakeholders and clients, which is crucial in order for you to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Here are a couple of the steps you need to take when creating an accounting workflow:

• State your company’s primary duties as well as primary processes and services that support one another. You should do this starting with your company’s highest-level activities. Later on focus on the smaller tasks that require input from team members and team managers. The accounting workflow will be improved if a more collaborative environment is created.
• Start with processes that have the biggest impact on your business.
• Make a workflow diagram to visualize the process and identify bottlenecks and inadequacies better.
• Test your revised or new workflow. This should be done gradually by starting small and later proceeding to bigger areas of your business. Doing this allows you to first identify shortcomings before rolling everything out on a large scale.
• Train your employees to ensure they effectively put everything in place as stated.

Automate Repetitive Tasks

Technology has done wonders to society, and its advantages are also being felt in the finance sector. In accounting, technology has made possible the automation of repetitive tasks through applications and programs such as Microsoft Excel.

Thanks to automation, tasks can be completed in a more efficient manner. This saves your business time that’s better spent on other activities that generate revenue.

Consider Specialization

Another way to perfect your accounting workflow is to consider specialization. For a small business, generalization undoubtedly has its benefits. However, it’s best to have employees who specialize in one particular area as this would boost their productivity and, in turn, improve your accounting workflow.

Therefore, you should allow your employees to focus on their areas of expertise. This way, you can be sure that an employee tasked with accounting duties is knowledgeable and skilled enough to handle them and not someone who’s skilled in customer care.

With all employees doing what they do best, you’ll be able to boost the efficiency of your business by minimizing the possibility of errors.

Improve Team Communication

For your company’s accounting workflow to improve, there needs to be efficient and excellent communication among your employees. After all, healthy communication is the backbone to building a solid and trustworthy relationship with your stakeholders and clients.

To improve communication between you, your employees and clients, conducting in-person communication sessions is necessary. This way, you’ll be able to take them through the new communication procedures and processes that can effectively promote better communication within the team.

Doing so would also encourage cooperation among employees since they’ll clearly understand their defined roles and avoid friction with others. With every employee understanding what’s expected of them from the new workflow, it’ll be easier for you to come up with a shared language for everyone in the business.

Take Measurements

You can’t know what needs to be improved if you don’t measure or assess your workflow processes. It’s only after developing useful metrics for measuring your accounting business processes that you’ll be able to tell what you should focus on.

These are a few of the different metrics you can look into: 

• Staff variance
• Your data’s reliability
• The time it takes to finish an end-to-end process
• The cost of finishing a process in terms of money, resources, and supplies
• The period required to attend to certain aspects of a process
• The accuracy of results

With clear measurements, you’ll be able to identify new accounting workflow processes that should be implemented to improve business efficiency.

Perfect Your Accounting Workflow – Summary

Your accounting process must always run efficiently for your company to succeed in today’s highly competitive business environment. If you ensure that, you’ll be able to protect margins as well as have more time for problem-solving, forecasting, and planning with your clients, hence improving customer satisfaction.

Greater levels of efficiency should be your goal as a business owner, and you can work toward that by using this guide to properly improve and perfect your accounting workflow in your business.