How to Build a Strong Accounting Team by Gennady Barsky

How to Build a Strong Accounting Team at your Company

When corporate leaders think about strengthening a particular department the first thing they often consider is what they can add in the way of personnel or technology. However, adding new team members to an accounting department or purchasing a new software package often assumes that existing resources are being used to their maximum potential. Often times the key to improving any department is finding ways to increase efficiency.

Process Walk-Through

In order to understand how improvements can be made to an existing accounting department it is often necessary to conduct a process walk-through. Meeting with individual employees and discussing how they complete their job on a routine basis is often enough to understand how improvements can be made. Carefully monitoring how daily tasks are completed on a step-bystep basis allows corporate leadership to discover the numerous small inefficiencies present in every process.

Maximize Software Functionality

For many accounting departments, specialized software is purchased for a highly specific purpose. However, this focus on original purpose often causes otherwise efficient departments to ignore additional functionality. It is important that team members sit down for a detailed analysis of total software functionality. This will usually require a meeting with the original vendor or an interdepartmental meeting with members of the technology department.

Expanded Training

Many organizations focus their process training on highly specialized skills or industry specific best practices. However, this often means that daily functionality is largely ignored as part of departmental wide training sessions. Specifically, many members of an accounting department lack the training necessary to work in conjunction with each other or with other departments within the organization. Process training that focuses on daily tasks or office routines offers a significant increase in efficiency for relatively little cost.

Departmental Evaluation

Regardless of purpose or function, process metrics is an integral part of every successful department. The key to establishing effective accounting process metrics is ensuring that they follow certain guidelines regarding simplicity and visibility. Process metrics should be easy to understand for all team members and access to results should be granted to all relevant parties.

Luckily, many of the more common accounting systems include a pre-existing mechanism for implementing and tracking process metrics. This allows organizations to measure departmental productivity and overall effectiveness against previous organizational data points or against existing industry standards.

Ultimately, ineffective organizations attempt to solve their problems through brute force recruiting or software additions. However, highly effective organizations find a way to examine what they already have and apply existing resources in new and creative ways.

Gennady Barsky is the CFO of JetSmarter, an entrepreneur, and a real estate investor.