Challenge Your Processes

by Michael on December 13, 2010

We are big on processes here at DeepSky; we believe it to be one of the fundamentals of day-to-day business operation as well as one of the first place to look to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of any company’s business/accounting operation. One of our secret sauce of a constantly improving accounting department is to always challenge our processes.

You don’t need fancy flow charts or expensive programs to have records of your processes – but you should definitely understand it fully and document it – no tribal knowledge allowed here. Talk to every single person (yes, even people beyond the accounting department) who is involve in the process and understand what job they are trying to accomplish and the steps they need to do to get there.

Challenge it. Challenge every step, every piece of paper (and every copy of that piece of paper *eww*), every hand that touches those paper, every key-in and every print out. Remember what it is that you are trying to accomplish in each process and question if each step is efficient or even necessary (tip: if the person doing the work feels stupid doing it.. there’s probably a smarter way.) Don’t be afraid to go against the “rules” that you’ve learned in the past – F the “rules” – it’s your business, your processes and you are responsible for the success of it.

Happy Monday and may all of you have an efficient (and more importantly, an effective) accounting department.

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Tagged as: Business Process, processes

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  • http://www.dustinwheelercpa.com Dustin Wheeler

    New technologies often drive change in processes. In my experience, adopting paperless technology was one that required drastic process changes, but it was well worth it after the learning curve had been overcome.

  • http://www.deepskyaccounting.com/ W. Michael Hsu

    couldn’t have said it better myself Dustin.. and with technologies changing so quickly today, it just means that we have to evaluate our processes more often than we did 20 years ago.

  • http://twitter.com/Chris_Padar Chris_Padar

    I love it! As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, the first things I want to see on any job are the documented processes. If you don’t have a consistent, repeatable process you won’t get consistent, repeatable results.

    Fancy flow charts are great since most people are visual learners. They aren’t hard to do and anyone can easily learn the steps. I taught my six-year-old daughter how to do them in less than an hour (on take your daughter to work day).

    I have a great two-hour class on process mapping. Maybe I’ll try to adapt it to a webinar at some point.

  • http://www.deepskyaccounting.com/ W. Michael Hsu

    I’m glad you love it Chris :) As a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and good friend.. we’d love it if you can share you process mapping skills on here or on a webinar soon =D

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