Page 293 - Accounting Best Practices

c13.qxd 7/31/03 3:23 PM Page 282
General Best Practices
282
program (consultants can be useful here, since managers may not have sufficient
available time to work on syllabi). Each syllabus is then handed over to a group
of in-house accounting staff, who become responsible for creating the details of
each course, and teaching it. A manager is typically assigned to each course to
oversee its development and act as a mentor.
The primary advantage of this approach is that training can be precisely tai-
lored to a company’s exact needs, throwing out all irrelevant topics that might
otherwise be taught during a university-sponsored class. Because of their extreme
specificity, these classes are also usually quite short, allowing employees to either
fit them into daytime schedules or into abbreviated evening training sessions.
Examples of training topics under this approach could be process-centering tech-
niques, methodologies for finding cost-cutting approaches within specific trans-
actions, and training on specific functions within the company’s accounting soft-
ware. Also, by bringing together trainers from all parts of the accounting
organization, from administrative assistants to the CFO, the level of communica-
tion will likely improve. Finally, because all training classes are created and
taught in-house, the incremental cost of classes is reduced.
Cost: Installation time:

13–23 CREATE AN ONGOING TRAINING PROGRAM
FOR ALL ACCOUNTING PERSONNEL

The efficiency and effectiveness of an accounting department are based on many
factors, but a crucial one all too many controllers ignore is training. Many
accounting managers simply assume that their staffs have acquired all the knowl-
edge they need in college and in subsequent work experience and need no further
training of any kind. This belief is based on the erroneous assumption that all
accounting practices are the same, no matter where accountants work, and that
employees can be neatly swapped between jobs and companies with no addi-
tional training of any kind. Over the long term, this can have a major impact on
the accounting staff, for the following reasons:
• Accounting rule changes. The accounting profession is constantly reviewing
changes in how accounting transactions are completed and reported, resulting
in a multitude of rule changes, especially in the area of financial reporting.
Anyone who has not received formal training in these changes within the
past few years must receive training in all rules updates, while those not having
been trained in a decade or more will require comprehensive retraining.
• Computer-specific knowledge. There are many accounting software packages
in use, all with their own quirks and foibles. Each of these packages requires