Mentoring Accounting Staff

Business owners -- especially small business owners -- who directly oversee their Accounting personnel frequently provide direction based on what makes sense to them. However, unless the owner has an Accounting background these directions are often handled in an entrepreneurial and haphazard manner which may not make sense when reviewing the related transactions just a few months later.

An inexperienced Accounting staff may follow the owner's directions without knowing whether a transaction is being handled properly. Additionally, the staff may not know what to prioritize in their roles or what a typical monthly Accounting cycle should look like. There may be one person who handles Billing and another who handles Accounts Payable and Payroll. The team may understand the basics of their roles, but not how the transactions they record impact the financials statements or how their efforts may impact the efforts of someone else on the team.

While there are many types of transactions which require experience or guidance, there are times when the team simply does not understand the ramifications of an incorrectly recorded transaction. For example, if the Accounts Payable staff member records an expense incorrectly, then the person handling Billing may not see that this transaction was supposed to be billed to a client. The company then loses money. In another instance if the person handling Payroll doesn't properly coordinate with the Admin or Human Resources personnel, then it could cause an employee to either not get paid or get paid too much.

It often takes someone with the understanding of how one role impacts another, how transactions dictated by ownership or other management personnel can affect the company's financial picture or how miscoding a transaction can be the difference between a profit and loss in a particular situation. Sometimes there may be tax ramifications by misrecording an owner distribution as an expense or vice versa.

The development of documented processes can assist everyone with getting on the same page. It's important to help the Accounting team understand how their roles fit into the big picture, support them in a manner that improves their confidence or review some basic concepts that will help them with their knowledge base. These are all areas that can create vast improvement in both the team's capabilities and their happiness in their roles.

You may think that you may need an experienced resource to provide some mentoring or guidance. Maybe you believe that someone with a strong Accounting background can provide some Accounting direction that you just can't provide. Feel free to setup a call to explore whether my spending a few hours of time with your Accounting team would be the right approach for your your business.