I’ve been in the accounting profession since being a new grad in 1997. Over those years, I’ve encountered problems related to both accurate and timely financials. When allowed, I’ve figured out and implemented the solutions to the problems.
The inaccurate bookkeeping that creates clean up catch up work for the next accountant is created by not having balance sheet account reconcilations in place every account every month treating each month’s financials as if it’s the last month of the fiscal year ready to be handed off to the auditor to conduct their work.
Operating on a paper based system and doing things manually prevents the books from being closed on a timely basis; which is just as important as the books being accurate. The 4 efficencies that need to be put in place:
setting up the bank feed transactions to automatically come to the cash operating accounts and all credit card accounts.
2. setting up recurring expenses to be paid on auto pay while getting all bills from the vendor website or having the bills emailed to accounting.
3. using a bill pay service to pay bills not on auto pay without having to print checks in house.
4. setting up the payroll entries to book automatically by way of the accounting software like Quickbooks communicating with the 3rd party payroll processor like ADP or Paychex. This saves lots of time freeing the accountant’s time to do other things.
Putting a cost allocation plan in place with various tables based on various factors like client head count, time and square footage used, time study, ect. This allows shared costs to be fairly allocated to cost centers, programs, revenue, reporting untis, ect.
Expense reporting to a funding source for reimbursement should be billed to the funding source following the funding source’s budget. This keeps you in compliance with the funding source and prevents unallowable expenses reimbursed for that could later have to be paid back.
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