Abenaki is here with 4 Tips you can put in place today to help you kick off the Financial New Year with a BANG!
Getting these in place at the beginning of your financial year will help you stay in compliance with your reporting agencies, and steer clear of default management.
- Implementing New Reports: Whether you produce reports for Managers, Directors, Councils or Boards; if you need to share your reporting with someone whose expertise is in a field other than finance it may be quite difficult. Using visually appealing, easy-to-read charts and graphs can go a long way to helping you share your information with others. Financial Reporter is a great tool that can help you customize reports for monthly expenses for budgeting or department-by-column for boards, chief and council to get a clear picture by department. Don’t know how to do this? We offer Financial Reporter training, and one-on-one support that can walk you through the steps to make stellar reports!
- Clean Up Your Financial Data: Do a little housekeeping and re-align your chart of accounts to reflect the programs they currently have implemented. This helps you produce better reports (see #1). Check if your system is matching current reporting requirements. We’ve had clients who still had over 3600 accounts and vendors from the 1980’s, and by cutting that down to 500 they saw an incredible increase in the speed of their system and accuracy in reporting. You need to manage your system, instead of your system managing you!
- Update Your System: This should be done regularly. Do you need hardware or operating system upgrades? Every department should have this worked into their budget, because… well, technology changes and so do the demands that software applications make. So that desktop with a 20GB hard drive and 512MB of RAM may need to be replaced with something newer. But beyond increasing your ability to do the work you need to, you’ll also be attracting better qualified, bright, young people who are equipped with the skills to use modern tools. It’s a win-win!
- Professional Development: We can’t emphasize this enough. Investing in your staff is really an investment in the future of your community. This is so important we’ll say it again in bold font…Investing in your staff is really an investment in your community. We can all develop blindspots and bad habits that can keep us from taking advantage of our financial system. Learn outside the box! Abenaki offers both customized training in your very own office, or your staff can attend one of our scheduled training sessions across Canada.
With these tools in place, you can kick back, pop the champagne, and light some fireworks (just not in the office), confident in the fact that the financial year ahead will be smooth sailing.
If you’re looking for someone to help you set some of these tools up in your organization, please give us a call at 800-361-1402, or fill out our contact form, and a member of the Abenaki team will walk you through some options.
We’re here to help!