Whether you’re the business owner or CFO of a business, streamlining your financial procedures is the best way to improve the efficiency of your financial workflows. So, if you are planning on doing this, good choice! But, how is it possible without compromising on accuracy? Here are 6 tips to help you if you’re struggling with this dilemma.
1. Assigning tasks and responsibilities to employees
One way to ensure that your streamlined financial procedures are effective is to assign specific tasks and responsibilities to your employees. Delegating responsibilities is a great way to not only relieve some workload from yourself, but also to show your employees that you trust them, helping to foster a productive and collaborative work environment.
2. Automate processes
The simplest and most ideal way when it comes to streamlining financial procedures is to automate them. Platforms such as Xelix do exactly this, enabling finance teams to work more efficiently due to the software that facilitates automated financial processes, as well as financial reporting, and it even protects your financial data. It would be worthwhile to look into these accounting solutions as they may end up saving you both time and money in the long run.
3. Consistent and accurate data reporting
Accurate financial reports are incredibly important in a business, especially when it comes to insights on how to further develop business operations and inform future business decisions. Furthermore, accurate reports will show the current financial state of the business, which is essential when it comes to attracting shareholders and retaining current ones. As a result, you must ensure that you conduct consistent and accurate financial reports – whether that’s on a monthly or quarterly basis.
4. Creating formalised processes for employees
Knowing exactly what steps to take can be immensely useful for employees, so it’s recommended that you create formalised processes which can be read as a document, poster, or a digital manual type of file, that explains financial procedures thoroughly for employees. This can be beneficial for new hires and training purposes as well.
5. Constant checking of data input
It would be a good idea to encourage both employees and yourself to triple-check data when inputting it in a spreadsheet or other, so that the risk of duplicate and erroneous data is minimised. Whilst this may seem tedious and an inconvenience, it will help your finance team in the long-term as there would be no need to re-do any audits or reports, as well as prevent any delays, as a result of false data. As mentioned previously, an accounting software is perfect for this as it can reduce the risk of human error and drawbacks such as duplicate invoices.
6. Identifying opportunities for improvement
What’s a better way to improve your financial procedures than to simply investigate and identify what exactly can be improved? This should be a priority as finding out areas that are in need of improvement and developing plans to actually improve them is what can give your finance team the upper hand. Work efficiency is therefore boosted!
You should also consider just listening to your employees about any criticisms they may have about current procedures, or conduct feedback surveys with an incentive.