How to Strengthen Office Billing & Accounting Procedures
It is very important to have strong billing and accounting procedures in your organization. Strong procedures will help improve the monthly closing of the accounting books, provide for better analysis of billing and accounting information and much more. Having strong, documented procedures will impress your auditors and transitioning new hires into the organization will be easier. A lot of what you can accomplish is dependent on the functionality of your billing and accounting software as well the number of people you will have dedicated to this task.
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Instructions
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Update all your accounting and billing procedure documentation. If you don't have all of them documented or have to create them from scratch, use a standard format for all of the documents in order to maintain consistency in the organization. A template of a process document can be found at docstoc.com. It is a very extensive form but could be edited to meet your specific needs. Have the appropriate individuals review and sign the documents. Save the soft copies of the documents on a shared directory.
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Create flow chart documents for each billing and accounting procedure documented. These are very helpful for clarifying your understanding of each process. If you do not have flow chart software, you can obtain a version of Microsoft Visio 2010.
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Consider implementing a workflow solution. If your major and complex processes are established in workflow you will have a much more effective way of notifying individuals when something needs their attention, you will gain an electronic trail of who did what and when and you will have tighter controls over your billing and accounting procedures. Your current software may actually have workflow and you don't realize it because it is not being used. If your software does not have a workflow component, consider purchasing a third party software which can be integrated with your current billing and accounting software. A few providers of this type of software are ProcessMaker, HighOrbit and WorkflowGen.
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Determine which billing and accounting procedures are causing your organization the biggest problems. Review why the problems exist and look at simple ways to make improvements. Many people just accept the fact that a procedure is done a certain way because it always has been done that way so they just live with the headache.
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Assign accounts in your general ledger to various individuals. These individuals will be responsible for reconciling and analyzing their accounts each month. In so doing, there should never be any surprises when there are questions out-of-the-blue about certain accounts posed by management and it will make closing the books at year-end that much smoother when dealing with the auditors.
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Find other organizations similar in size as yours and ask how they handle certain billing and accounting procedures. They may have certain problem areas that you can provide input to as well.
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Keep your billing and accounting procedure documents current as changes to procedures are made.
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References
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