Insurance noodle

When you need to fill positions within the finance department, it is important that you create a hiring strategy. Finance recruiters will be able to help you fulfill the strategy entirely so that you can focus on other areas of the business. If you are responsible for all aspects of hiring, you will find that the process is going to take considerably longer – and this may not be something that you can afford.

Your hiring strategy needs to consist of such things as:

a sufficient job description
a large pool of candidates to choose from
a list of desirable skills
knowledge of the industry
various ways of listing the job opening
a timeline
Executing the hiring strategy is going to take knowledge of the hiring process, as well as multiple people to help you. You cannot be responsible for creating the job description, creating job opening listings around the area, compiling all of the resumes, and conducting interviews. It simply cannot be done because you have other responsibilities within your organization.

Finance recruiters will be able to streamline the process because it is their business. They are responsible for recruiting finance individuals all the time and therefore they already have a lot of the work done for you. They have a timeline that can be customized for you, they have job descriptions that can be tweaked for your organization, and they most likely have a large pool of candidates that they can already begin pulling from.

By working with professional finance recruiters, you can make short work of hiring a qualified individual for your organization. Regardless of the actual job position that you need to hire for, a recruiter will be able to find you someone quickly so that you can get them started right away.

The longer you leave a job position open, the more strenuous it is going to be for the others within the department. For example, if you need someone in the Accounts Receivable department, everyone else is going to work longer hours and have more on their desks because you are short one person. If you begin to stress all of your employees out for too long, you may be looking for more than just one person because others will get tired of picking up the slack and leave the organization as well.

Finance recruiters will simplify the process, expedite the hiring process, and find you qualified candidates. They are familiar with the skills needed within the finance industry and can tell the difference between someone who has skills and someone who has a polished resume. This will work to your advantage. So that you can feel confident in the person that you ultimately offer the job position two.

You can be as involved in the process as you want to be – and finance recruiters will pick up the slack when needed so that you can meet all of your deadlines and have someone on staff quickly.

Whitaker is one of the nation’s most respected names in professional recruiting. Our national staffing companies provide the highest quality contract and direct-hire staffing solutions for a wide variety of enterprises and organizations in three areas of disciplinary focus – information technology, accounting & finance, and engineering / technical professions. Within these areas of specialization, we provide staffing solutions for key positions that require premium credentials and where demand is high.

As a finance director you may not be fully aware, but your finance department could also be a part of the overwhelming majority that are concealing an illness. The question you need to raise is your account reconciliation process fighting fit? A reconciliation medical exam will dramatically improve your finance department’s processes and will deliver additional worth and help facilitate to drive down costs. In line with a recent finance survey, only 8% of financial accounting employees are actually happy with their monthly close process. This implies that a large 92% of finance workers assume that it is time to call in the doctor as their financial close procedure is sick. The simplest way to help establish all of the potential issues within finance department is to carry out a reconciliation medical exam.

There are 3 main advantages of an efficient account reconciliation strategy that need to be considered: reduced operational costs, mitigated risk, and the tightest attainable compliance. Each account reconciliation method ought to give clear visibility over key financial information to bring these advantages – nevertheless however in line with a recent financial survey; only 8% of senior finance employees are happy with the visibility of key financial information.

Stages of the reconciliation lifecycle

There are four major stages to a reconciliation lifecycle:

1. Data import and enrichment.

2. Matching.

3. Exception management.

4. Reconciliation.

In order to produce the complete advantages of the account reconciliation process every stage should be in good health: optimised to be sturdy nevertheless agile, and standardised across your entire business. However, with 46% of finance employees using a shared spreadsheet solution to achieve a summary of all their data, their ledgers, to achieve the level of standardised reconciliation required for a really great reconciliation process may be a tall order indeed.

Checking the health of each stage

A health check of every stage of your reconciliation lifecycle should not be a large challenge. You need to possess an honest appraisal of where your department presently sits and wherever you wish to be.

1. Import and enrichment – This initiative is crucial in standardising your data. Enriching your knowledge upon import is much more efficient than doing it ad-hoc, reducing the price of your reconciliation process and limiting the chance of errors later on.

Health risks: the data import and enrichment method could also be let down by the usage of spreadsheets – thus if you’re still using them as an accounting cure, stop! They provide unsecure following or segregation of duties, no automation of enrichment and they do not preserve the initial details of the account. Not to mention the potential problems that arise from sharing spreadsheets- Sharing a finance spreadsheet is extraordinarily risky especially when it involves the health of your reconciliation. It is not always possible to inform you who has used the spreadsheet, have their changes documented and spot any errors that are created. Despite this risk, over half of all finance departments still share finance spreadsheets to organise their reconciliation.

Prescription: Specialist accounting software packages are much quicker, more accurate and helps guarantee compliance – paying for itself in the reduction of cost to your department.

2. Matching – Matching financial data is the core of your reconciliation process and also the one that consumes the most amount of time. While comparatively easy, the task is horrendously mundane for any accounting employees.

Health risks: Its very nature implies that manual data matching will prove to be the most error prone stage of the reconciliation method. Providing that a quarter of finance employees have no second authority or approver, this might mean that mistakes aren’t detected before filing.

Prescription: automated transaction and data matching software solutions cuts out around 98% of the manual work, serving to minimise errors. An enhanced automation software solution can even progress the reconciliation lifecycle forward for you and make sure that there is continually a second authority before figures may be signed-off.

3. Exception management – to create the most effective use of your time you want to be able to prioritize the unmatched exceptions in your ledgers.

Health risks: whereas exception management ought to cut back operational costs, sloppy budgets, input errors and also the increased activity for the managerial team will mean that costs grow much higher. This might be somewhat relieved by a less centralised method, permitting employees to tackle exceptions at source rather than add an additional method in later.

Prescription: automated account reconciliation software may be tailored to manage exceptions, which can help by dramatically reducing time, cost and error rate.

4. Reconciliation – The part where you get to play detective. Why don’t these amounts match: It might or might not be an error, underpayment or even perhaps fraud? Reconciling mismatched figures provides finance employees plenty additional information to get their teeth into; however the method remains vulnerable to health issues.

Health risks: one of the largest reconciliation health risks is that the overreliance on paper for archiving. When reconciling items, it’s typically necessary to trace back through all of the previous monthly close reports, as well as ledger entries and bank statements. However, 64% of finance employees still at least, in some way rely, on binders and paper to archive their financial close results.

Prescription: as well as being far more secure, digital archives can also be much easier to look through than paper archived financial data for the required information. Digitised financial archives create the reconciliation process faster, easier additionally as helping you keep compliant with things like eDiscovery requests.

Overall, the reconciliation lifecycle is an important method for the finance department, however for many people there is still an abundance of enhancements that are required to be carried out. The health risks exposed to your finance department’s reporting, issues with governance, risk and compliance and threats to your future financial position are all over the place. It is necessary for Finance directors and CFOs to make sure that their reconciliation process is in great health. A healthy finance reconciliation helps maintain correct and up-to-date general ledger data by comparing it to details noted within the subsidiary ledger for every account.

Poor reconciliation will result in cancerous late payment penalties, unnoticed liabilities, and missed vendor discounts. For these reasons each finance department ought to perform a daily self-examination, or internal audit frequently.

However, if you are seeking for the magic pill which will alleviate all of your woes then you ought to take a look at an enhanced balance sheet reconciliation software package. This type of accounting and reporting software package automates giant chunks of the reconciliation lifecycle, delivering multiple prescriptions quickly.

Nobody knows your business better than you do. After all, you are the CEO. You know what the engineers do; you know what the production managers do; and nobody understands the sales process better than you. You know who is carrying their weight and who isn’t. That is, unless we’re talking about the finance and accounting managers.

Most CEO’s, especially in small and mid-size enterprises, come from operational or sales backgrounds. They have often gained some knowledge of finance and accounting through their careers, but only to the extent necessary. But as the CEO, they must make judgments about the performance and competence of the accountants as well as the operations and sales managers.

So, how does the diligent CEO evaluate the finance and accounting functions in his company? All too often, the CEO assigns a qualitative value based on the quantitative message. In other words, if the Controller delivers a positive, upbeat financial report, the CEO will have positive feelings toward the Controller. And if the Controller delivers a bleak message, the CEO will have a negative reaction to the person. Unfortunately, “shooting the messenger” is not at all uncommon.

The dangers inherent in this approach should be obvious. The Controller (or CFO, bookkeeper, whoever) may realize that in order to protect their career, they need to make the numbers look better than they really are, or they need to draw attention away from negative matters and focus on positive matters. This raises the probability that important issues won’t get the attention they deserve. It also raises the probability that good people will be lost for the wrong reasons.

The CEO’s of large public companies have a big advantage when it comes to evaluating the performance of the finance department. They have the audit committee of the board of directors, the auditors, the SEC, Wall Street analyst and public shareholders giving them feedback. In smaller businesses, however, CEO’s need to develop their own methods and processes for evaluating the performance of their financial managers.

Here are a few suggestions for the small business CEO:

Timely and Accurate Financial Reports

Chances are that at some point in your career, you have been advised that you should insist on “timely and accurate” financial reports from your accounting group. Unfortunately, you are probably a very good judge of what is timely, but you may not be nearly as good a judge of what is accurate. Certainly, you don’t have the time to test the recording of transactions and to verify the accuracy of reports, but there are some things that you can and should do.

Insist that financial reports include comparisons over a number of periods. This will allow you to judge the consistency of recording and reporting transactions.
Make sure that all anomalies are explained.
Recurring expenses such as rents and utilities should be reported in the appropriate period. An explanation that – “there are two rents in April because we paid May early” – is unacceptable. The May rent should be reported as a May expense.
Occasionally, ask to be reminded about the company’s policies for recording revenues, capitalizing costs, etc.
Beyond Monthly Financial Reports

You should expect to get information from your accounting and finance groups on a daily basis, not just when monthly financial reports are due. Some good examples are:

Daily cash balance reports.
Accounts receivable collection updates.
Cash flow forecasts (cash requirements)
Significant or unusual transactions.
Consistent Work Habits

We’ve all known people who took it easy for weeks, then pulled an all-nighter to meet a deadline. Such inconsistent work habits are strong indicators that the individual is not attentive to processes. It also sharply raises the probability of errors in the frantic last-minute activities.

Willingness to Be Controversial

As the CEO, you need to make it very clear to the finance/accounting managers that you expect frank and honest information and that they will not be victims of “shoot the messenger” thinking. Once that assurance is given, your financial managers should be an integral part of your company’s management team. They should not be reluctant to express their opinions and concerns to you or to other department leaders.