you have to manage three kinds of procedures

need help with internal procedures? here are three apps for organizing them.

by penny breslin
it’s not just the numbers

there is a symbiotic relationship between your technology and your processes. you have to consider both, or you won’t get the full benefit.

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mckinsey global has been researching the impact of automation around the world, and (no surprise) found that when companies try to retrofit technology to fit into existing processes, “companies end up with a patchwork of incongruous technology tools that automate separate and distinct parts of the process. this approach is fine for capturing the first 5 percent or so of automation’s impact. but unlocking the full potential requires a fundamentally different way of thinking. to capture that potential, managers must be willing to re-engineer their processes completely.”

this means that anytime you add a new tech tool to your little black dress of technology, you and your team need to be willing to tear apart your existing procedures to fit the new piece in, and create a new way of doing the work. always be looking for ways to make things better.

there are internal firm procedures and there are standard accounting procedures and then there are client-specific procedures. these are my explanations and definitions based on what i have observed. are they written down in stone somewhere? i do not know. actually, these are hardly ever written down, hence confusion and long learning curves in a fast-changing environment. accounting itself has changed little, well, except for tax rules, but relationships with employees, clients and technology, those change fast, dorothy.

internal firm procedures are the ways your firm gets work done and how you do business with the world. this includes your procedures for onboarding and offboarding both clients and employees, how you document processes, how internal meetings run, and what software and apps you use to track workflows and to get work done. this also includes the expectations for team members within their roles.

standard accounting procedures are the ways you convert information from your client into a coherent set of books. this encompasses the basic accounting principles you learned in your accounting 101 or bookkeeping 101 class, and adds the use of your little black dress of technology and apps you use to get the information in the system.

client-specific procedures are the variations on the above that customize how your team does the work for a particular client. this includes the special apps they like to use, or specific procedures needed to integrate their pos system with their gl. all of these are documented in a client’s playbook.

when we are developing procedures for a new client or a new app, we have someone talk through their method of moving or directing data and record it. then we have it transcribed to find the holes the other person left out.

case study: make sure you know what you’re getting into before you quote a price

i was walking my dogs when i received a call from a consultant asking me what i would charge for monthly bookkeeping on a client with one bank account, two credit cards, a shopify account and qbo. my answer was i don’t know enough about the business. then i asked him why. he said he originally got a quote from a firm to do the monthly reconciliations for $300 per month. i said that sounds like a good deal. then he said they came back after one month and upped it to $1,800 a month and told us we had to manage the inventory. the inventory mentioned at the end made me smile.

my friend did not know what he had to provide to the firm in order to get a real price and the firm did not ask for any info other than the number of active transaction feed accounts to reconcile. i let the dogs off the leash in the dog park, sat on a bench and asked him a slew of questions. at the end, i said, yep, i would charge $1,800 for all of that, too. i told him he undersold the work and the firm was correct. there was a lot more to the monthly bookkeeping for this business. a whole lot more. and it was actually two businesses and so could be even more than the $1,800. by the time we got through he was worried. i told him sit down with the client and hand draw out on paper:

phase one: data control

data sets that need to be managed? initially, he said bank and credit cards plus shopify; after 20 minutes, he admitted amazon was another source.

where do they come from? bank and credit card feeds are standard these days, but what other apps does the business use?

does every transaction need to be in the books? does all that customer detail need to be synced into qbo? if so what part or all of the data sets? can we just use a daily summary transaction and rely on the apps for the detail?

what is the outcome you and the business owner want from all these data points? have you considered kpi software for those reports?

put the gl in the middle and draw your diagram.

some useful apps for procedures

three products that are very useful for creating and organizing procedures are onenote, zoom with otter.ai, and the voice recorder on your smartphone. these all work in the app world. onenote is part of your ms office suite. it integrates seamlessly with all ms products. if you don’t use ms office, then google docs and google sheets are accessible and easy to share and search. evernote is another great sharing tool that allows for quick notes, images and file sharing.

onenote and zoom’s ability to capture voice and video is wonderful if you are not a “write it down as you work” person. people learn differently: some by reading, some by seeing, some by hearing and some by doing. it’s nice to have options on how to capture this important information.

while onsite or doing client work that has yet to be documented, just talk to your smartphone voice recorder while you are working or interviewing a client. share the .wav file with your bkm or prp person on your team via the shared capabilities function or upload it to your slack. then create a task for the admin to document the .wav file. make sure they then mark the task complete, so you know they have documented the procedures. better yet, go big and get otter.ai or chorus.ai. otter.ai uses ai to transcribe conversations in almost real time. chorus.ai uses ai to analyze recorded conversations to extract useful details. you can keep all your procedures and documentation in onenote. remember, inspect what you expect! recognize that once your procedures are developed, they most likely will change as your client’s business changes.

typically, when working with firms, we get chaos to start. what procedures they do have are not consistent, if they exist at all. i always recommend they put their phone recorder on when driving to and from work. just talk and we will write the procedure up for you. then you can edit to your discretion or include additional knowledge. we have one firm that is so swift on this. we can post a simple question in our shared slack and within minutes get an uploaded loom video that describes exactly what they want. this firm started with a half-seat at the end of 2019 and by mid-2020, two full-time accountants were working on their files.

case study: not everyone learns the same way

when i first was studying to be a teacher, my children were themselves just starting in school. i had a degree but was adding secondary education certification. my two older kids showed learning disabilities with dyslexia. i was at a loss on how to help them and their school was not anxious to label them at the time.

i consulted one of my professors and she gave me some great insight. she first asked me how i learned to read. i remembered because for me it was an awesome experience to pick up a book and go into another world. i remember one of my older sisters helping me read to prepare for kindergarten. by fifth grade, i was checking out shakespeare in the student library at st. ann’s.

for christmas, my gift from my kids was a couple of science fiction books their dad would help pick out and then they all played for the day while i just read. for my children not to have that was, to me, devastating.

the first thing the prof taught me was the different ways people learn: sight, sound, touch and do. the next thing she taught me was to remember what i had difficulty with – numbers. yep, i am lousy at anything that has to do with math beyond simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and those were not easy in the first place. i learned to read without trying but math was sweat by sweat each year.

i needed to learn how to break down reading to the lowest level possible and find the input method they both could best learn by.

my kids learned to adapt, and with long drives to hockey and figure skating events, we used books on tape to get them through the required reading in school. if the book was not pre-recorded i did it myself. the concepts came to the two oldest better and faster than their kid sister who could read anything. they often had to help her with book reports.

posted on november 21, 2023