How can we make life easier for our accounting team while asking more of them?

It’s about automating and streamlining – and takes people, processes, and technology.

Let’s take a look!

Technology

Set up bank feeds
Record processes using a tool like Screencast-O-Matic and post the screencasts to a place that the team can access. This helps to get the most value from your top-level finance people instead of having them spend their time on more repetitive financial tasks
Record task checklists in a workflow tool like Asana, Monday, or Wrike. Start with recurring tasks and include decision-making trees.
Implement tools to automate tasks which don’t require human judgment, and to batch/streamline tasks which do. For example: memorized transactions, recurring transactions, transaction templates, Batch Enter, Find & Recode.
Don’t use spreadsheets or other separate stand-alone files if the main technology that you have can do the trick. Learn more about what it’s capable of. Unnecessary separate systems will cause wasted time. If a separate spreadsheet is necessary, design it to be an easily-updatable template.

PROCESSES:

Encourage electronic transactions and not use paper checks
Have vendors e-mail their invoices to a Bill.com address or Hubdoc address. Hubdoc will employ OCR and handle some of the data entry for you
Use a simple, standardized Chart of Accounts. Make sure it’s meaningful to the organization but don’t let it explode with details which don’t contribute to a decision-making process.

PEOPLE:

Control the quality of the information stream, so make sure that only well-trained, process-oriented people are sending information to the Accounting team.
Authorize new apps and processes such as the ones listed above. If the invoicing process can be streamlined by using TSheets for example, authorize a training and work with service providers to get the team trained on it.
Make sure everyone is on board for streamlining and if someone is resistant, decide whether you are going to provide coaching or engage in a different course of action. Someone resistant to process will kill a company.