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.
Assignment of responsibility for certain functions of the bookkeeping and accounting process ensures that when a problem occurs a specific person is accountable. This, in turn, provides an incentive to that person to do their job correctly because any issue or problem will be their sole responsibility. Splitting duties has a similar impact on employees. By providing a system of checks and balances, i.e. one person keeps the records while another keeps the assets, the chance for fraud is greatly decrease and honest mistakes are easily caught. There are many physical, mechanical and electronic controls that provide further safety for a company’s assets. These include passwords, safes, alarms, security cameras, time clocks and locks (Kiesco et.al, 2008). The use of an auditor or other third party to independently verify the bookkeeping and accounting procedures performed by employees adds another layer of safeguarding to a company’s inter...
The stereotypical image correlated to the account mirrors that of a public accountant. An individual working as a public accountant can expect to work as an independent third party to a multitude of companies. As this third party it is their duty to oversee financial transactions to ensure that the statements of not only the company, but also its’ supporting companies, correctly correspond and match up to the position, results and cash-flow of the clientele. This general quota outlining a public accountants job description is not the same for a private accountant. The main difference between a public and private accountant is that unlike the public and its handle on a multitude of accounts, a private accountant specializes with a certain company or field. With this specialization, a private accountant tackles setting up a system that records the transactions within the business. The recordation of the transactions is then generated into statem...
Sahira has received employee complaints about the lengthy time it takes for her team to create financial reports. Her team explains that the computers are the problem and that the software programs are too difficult to use and that many hours of manual manipulation of data are required to complete monthly reports (Colorado State University-Global Campus, 2014, p. 6, ¶3). The management dilemma can be described as: Delays in financial reporting? (Appendix, Worksheet box 1). Upon further examination, the specific management question to be addressed is: Can financial data management be made more efficient? (Appendix, Worksheet box 2). Consequently, the research questions are: 1) How to streamline data for financial reporting? and 2) Is a new accounting software system needed? (Appendix, Worksheet box 3). Finally, a key accounting and financial management theory at play here is that of efficiency in data management to improve efficacy and timeliness of financial reporting.
They must be able to address these issues as well as gather all information that is connected to problems. Loyalty: loyalty means being able to instill faith from the clients or employer by building good communication, confident by always being truthful. The accountant must also uphold their oath to society of business ethics. Professional behavior: I think that professional behavior is the above four all wrapped in one because in order to present professional behavior you must exemplify all the rest such as trustworthiness, honesty, loyalty, be objectivity and diligence to implement good ethical behavior. The accountant must also be able to implement the AICPA and GAAP accounting rules and regulation to the fullness.
Filing information and documents (manually and using computerised databases) and being able to find them again when necessary. They must also ensure confidentiality of private and sensitive information.
At the end of the year when it comes time to condense and archive your work files or complete your shredding for the past year you are in for big trouble. There are two main aspects to the common filing problem. Number one is that people don't know how to set up a system. It is crucial to know you NEED a filing system when learning how to be organized at work. But where do you even begin?
The types of reports might include a balance sheet, revenues and expenses, pledged receivables, cash flow, and utilization. In order to carry out this, I recommend having a good software system that will enable the organization to quickly and easily customize
Not only the overall reputation but also the actual financial stability of it can depend on the doing things right and this will only come from good employees. In a hospital setting the accounting department is responsible for preparing financial statements, maintain general ledger, pay bills, bill patients, payroll cost accounting financial analysis and among many other functions. Accountants main duties are to record, track and report financial transactions.
Change is inevitable. Yogi Berra once said “The future ain’t what it used to be.” It is clear that the future of the accounting profession ain’t what it used to be (Gormon and Hargadon 1). The changes occurring are happening fast, they are dynamic and they are completely and undeniably real. Since the world around the accountant is changing, the accountant has no option but to change as well. The field of accounting has always been one to know change and to know adjustment, but within the recent past and certainly within the next few decades, the changes that are occurring and will occur absolutely are the most dramatic and exponential yet. Obvious changes lie in the expanding scope of services performed by accountants, the increased use of
When planning to implement a document management system, there are many factors to consider. First you have to consider how you want to store your documents, be it electronic, paper format, or both; you have to have adequate storage space. Next you have to decide whether you are going to attempt to archive old documents your organization has in storage. A major factor in determining the format you are going to save your documents in is to decide the length of time you wish to keep you documents and the amount of space you have in which to keep your documents. If you are going to keep your documents in a paper format you have to keep in mind the amount of space it will take to store them. Another consideration when determining storage of your organizations documents is how you want to organize your documents be it chronologically or subject based, you need to decide what works best for your organization. And lastly you have to decide how you are going to take those old documents, created before computers, and turn them in to a format which can be stored electronically. There are many different formats which can be beneficial when keeping an archive of documents. There are many reasons why documents need to be managed. First and foremost they serve as a historical log of where your organization came from and they will help shape where your organization can go in the future. Documents can be a reference of how past projects were worked and offer practical solutions for issues which come up in all projects. Keeping documents can be beneficial for every organization, from keeping records to showing where the organization can go, documents play a part in the every day workings of every organization.
An accountant makes sure that the Nation’s firms are run efficiently, the public records are kept accurately, and that taxes are paid properly and on time (“Accountants and Auditors”). Accounting is the study of how a business tracks their income, assets, expenses, and many other things for a period of time. They also do many other things like quality management, tax strategy, and health care benefits management (“Welcome to Careers in Accounting”). An accountant is crucial to the success of a business, without one the business tends to fail.
An Accounting Information System (AIS) can be defined as software that helps accountants to collect data and process it to create information ((Bagranoff, Simkin and Norman 2010)
Accounting is one of the fastest growing fields in the United States It expands each time a new store, a factory, a filling station, or a school goes up, whether in a large city or a small town. In today's society, the demand for good accountants for exceeds the supply. As our country has expanded, business and industry have become more and more complex, so control here is very important. And control depends on a great deal of the bookkeepers and accountants who can analyze figues and advise management on what should be done. They are using more scientific ways changing money, figuring change, and collecting sales taxes. Moreover, department stores and other companies now have plants and offices widely scattered throughout the country. A new set of bookkeepers and accountants, is needed at each branch. I know there are many managements supervisory, and junior or senior executive positions are bing filled by people who started as accountants because accountants have the knowledge of methods and finance and comprehension of the fundamentals of business, and acc...
one will begin to see more and more documents being on CD-ROM and also on the
The major characters of the tradition audit are all information what is needed by auditors are on the paper and the manual calculators and without high communication technology. Auditors usually were limited by the place in the paper time. When a several people are working on the same auditing project for a client with offices in cities across the country, even worldwide, it takes a lots all time those auditors get the information which they need from the client, even there is risk paper information disappear for many reasons. on the another hand, mail paper information increase the auditing cost. The mistake caused by the manual calculators inevitably, no matter how fixed auditors concentrate on recalculate is, after all auditors are human. The global business become major in the modern business world, some example, several auditors who are in different locations are working a same auditing project, or auditors are in different city even country with the client, when there is issue among these auditors or between auditors and client, they only can communicate with each other by phone or be together and have meeting. Phone call can not make sure information been watched in the same time when the voice is talking about the issue, but having a meeting takes time and money make all people together, it increases auditing cost.