Why the speed of data collection is critical for your business’s success.
Spending too much time on tasks that do not add value to your business and your customers is always destructive. If the accounts team takes too long to pay suppliers, collect monies, calculate sales & profit levels and other key information, then there is both a high administration cost due to inefficiency and an opportunity cost for not knowing the information on time. Financial information must be instantly available to support decision making at all levels in the business.
It should not be hard to communicate important reports to team members. Ideally, team members should be capable of accessing and using parts of the accounts system to get information and generating their own reports. Sales teams should be able to calculate sales or commissions quickly and easily. Stores staff should be able to view all the details about a stock parts such as quantities in stock, re-order levels, location and customer/supplier goods on-order.
The accounting and administration systems should be setup to store and retrieve all the information flowing through a business. Over the past 15 years, accounting software has become very powerful and it is now possible for a person with little financial background to generate powerful reports and control the financial operations of a multi-million turnover business.
The training of staff to get the most from accounting and administration systems is essential. Everyone in the business that inputs data needs to follow a set procedure of recording the information. The consistent and accurate recording of data will ensure that reports and information are easily retrieved to support decision making. Businesses should move away from spreadsheets as while they are fine for data input, they are terrible at information reporting and retrieval. The accounting process in any business only becomes highly complicated when the information is tangled in a mess of unknowns. Trained staff will ensure that information is recorded once for all reporting purposes.
Business owners should view the professional setup of the accounting and administration systems as an investment and a key asset in the business. The speed at which staff collect data and report is a key component to business success. It will payoff handsomely in terms of making the most of opportunities that come your way and the efficiencies gain will reduce the administration costs of running the business.
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