The Importance Of Organizing The Accounting Office

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Organizing Your Accounting Office 2

Organizing Your Accounting Office: A Crucial First Step to Your Success.
Organization in the Accounting office starts with reducing the paper trail by scanning all documents that come into your office, proper labeling and good documentation.
An Accounting office is a busy place, not just during tax season. Because a lot of their work has deadlines and because of the privacy needed for the documents of their clients organization is very important. The three crucial areas of organization should start with scanning documents, having a filing system and proper documentation.
Accountants do more than prepare income taxes. They also process payroll, do bookkeeping for their clients, prepare financial statements and do quartiles for their business clients. “Organization is crucial to performing professional duties in an efficient and cost effective manner” (Kent pg. 1)
Because of the large amount of documents each client has and the length of time those files have to be kept, another way many Accounting office’s today are organizing is they scan every document the client brings into the office. This is a sure way not to lose important papers, but it also greatly reduces the amount of files that will accumulate in the filing cabinets over the many years. “Since accounting is extremely paper intensive, with much of the paperwork having legal, compliance and/or regulatory consequences, it’s easy to quickly become sidetracked under a
Organizing Your Accounting Office 3 mound of disorganized files” (Shaver Feb 1, 2001) It also allows more than one person working in the office to view the same client’s documents or for the Accountant to move documents around with a jump dr...

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...ea that is important in running a well-organized office. Because of the importance and time sensitive documents an Accounting office handles, it is important to have the person who handles the mail to date everything that comes into and leaves the office.
It is also important to document all correspondences with your clients in person or over the phone. Many Accounting offices also use a message book with carbon copy’s just in case the original gets lost, there is always a copy in the book. This ensures that all messages from clients can have proper follow up.
“Organizing your office to increase productivity is just like any other skill, it takes practice to become perfect” (Shaver pg. 27) with reducing paper, proper labeling and good documentation, your office will be on track to being well organized and in turn you’ll have more productive employees.

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