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Chapter 11
Finance Best Practices

This book is primarily about improving the accounting function, not the finance
function. However, this area is commonly integrated into the accounting depart-
ment in smaller organizations, where the cost of a treasury staff cannot be justi-
fied. Thus, this area becomes part of the accounting function, and so a limited set
of best practices are included here. They are primarily oriented toward treasury,
risk management, and investor relations applications that can be located on the
Internet. The reason for so many Internet-based best practices is that they can be
readily accessed and used at a moderate cost, since there is no software to install
on one’s computer or large up-front costs to incur. These are important issues for
the controllers of smaller companies, who can quickly browse through the Web
site addresses that are sprinkled throughout this chapter, and see which applica-
tions will be of the most use to them.
Only in one case is an expensive and time-consuming best practice listed—
the use of a treasury workstation. It is really only cost-effective for a larger com-
pany, but is included here because it does such a good job of integrating and
improving on a number of rote treasury functions. It is highly recommended for
those organizations that can afford it, but its substantial cost should be carefully
reviewed before a decision is made.
This chapter begins with a short review of the level of implementation diffi-
culty for each finance best practice, and then moves on to individual discussions of
each one. There is no final section that describes how these items can be used in
concert, since these functions operate just as well if implemented individually—
there is little efficiency to be gained through overlapping finance best practices.

IMPLEMENTATION ISSUES FOR FINANCE BEST PRACTICES

This section notes in Exhibit 11.1 the level of implementation difficulty that one
can expect when installing the finance-related best practices in this chapter.
Exhibit 11.1 describes the cost and duration of implementation for each best
practice. Since most of the best practices are Internet-based, there is no up-front
acquisition cost, which keeps the cost of implementation squarely in the “inex-
pensive” category. However, many of these services are fee-based or require extra
fees for advanced services, so there will be incremental charges associated with
their use.
The duration of implementation for these Internet-based applications is
listed as “medium” in the exhibit, though a company can make them operational

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