Page 212 - Accounting Best Practices

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10–12 Move Records Off-Site
creating and distributing the reports (with an extra charge for each additional
person who is sent each report). Incurring an expense for information almost
invariably will cause department managers to take a serious look at cutting
back on their use of reports, which bodes well for the filing staff.
5. Post reports on the computer network. This last option can be substituted for
the previous step of charging for report usage. This one allows the filing staff
to avoid all work by posting electronic reports on the computer network,
where users can access it for themselves. This approach may not work for
some reports that do not convert readily to a readable format for all computer
terminals, nor is it available to those report recipients who do not have a
computer or access to one. Still, given the recent surge in the use of corpo-
rate intranets, this may be the preferred approach of the future for the distrib-
ution of reports.

These steps, taken in the order presented, are usually sufficient to bring about
a drastic reduction in the number of reports being used and issued, which has a
correspondingly large and favorable impact on the quantity of filing work that
can be eliminated.

Cost: Installation time:

10–12 MOVE RECORDS OFF-SITE

A controller can have an exceedingly inefficient accounting operation for no
other reason than the presence of an immense amount of records in the account-
ing area, which makes it difficult to find a sufficient amount of operating space
and renders it difficult to find the most current information. Frequently, these
records are kept near the accounting staff on the erroneous grounds that there will
be times when they are needed and that it will be an exceptional hassle to recover
them if they are stored elsewhere. This is a particularly difficult problem if the
accounting staff has been in place for many years and is accustomed to having
records kept close at hand.
The best practice to resolve clutter caused by too many records is to review
the dates of the records and move the oldest items to a secondary location. The
cut-off date for which records will be moved is usually for anything that is not in
the current year of operations. There may be a few cases where additional records
should be kept, such as records from the previous year that the auditors might
request during their annual audit. However, in general, these records can be
moved out with minimal impact on current operations.
The main objectors to this approach will be those staff members who have
grown accustomed to keeping files close at hand, but this objection will usually
recede over time, especially if a good index clearly identifies which storage box