Page 16 - Accounting Best Practices

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The Most Fertile Ground for Best Practices
having the receiving staff approve all payments at the receiving dock (see Chapter
3); it involves the elimination of many jobs and is an entirely new approach to pay-
ing suppliers. A single best practice implementation of this sort can reap major
improvements in the level of accounting efficiency.
Thus, given the considerable number and size of the differences between the
incremental and reengineering best practices, it is necessary to first determine
into which category a best practice falls before designing a plan for implementing
it. Given the difficulty of implementation for a reengineering project, it may even
be necessary to delay implementation or intersperse a series of such projects with
easier incremental projects, in order to allow employees to recover from the
reengineering projects.

THE MOST FERTILE GROUND FOR BEST PRACTICES
Before installing any best practice, it is useful to review the existing environment
to see if there is a reasonable chance for the implementation to succeed. The fol-
lowing bullet points note the best environments in which best practices can not
only be installed, but also have a fair chance of continuing to succeed:

• If benchmarking shows a problem. Some organizations regularly compare
their performance levels against those of other companies, especially those
with a reputation for having extremely high levels of performance. If there is
a significant difference in the performance levels of these other organizations
and the company doing the benchmarking, this can serve as a reminder that
continuous change is necessary in order to survive. If management sees and
heeds this warning, the environment in which best practices will be accepted
is greatly improved.
• If management has a change orientation. Some managers have a seemingly
genetic disposition toward change. If an accounting department has such a
person in charge, there will certainly be a drive toward many changes. If any-
thing, this type of person can go too far, implementing too many projects
with not enough preparation, resulting in a confused operations group whose
newly revised systems may take a considerable amount of time to untangle.
The presence of a detail-oriented second-in-command is very helpful for
preserving order and channeling the energies of such a manager into the
most productive directions.
• If the company is experiencing poor financial results. If there is a significant
loss, or a trend in that direction, this serves as a wake-up call to management,
which in turn results in the creation of a multitude of best practices projects.
In this case, the situation may even go too far, with so many improvement
projects going on at once that there are not enough resources to go around,
resulting in the ultimate completion of few, if any, of the best practices.