Help and ideas for busy numbers people
On the face of it, processing timesheets with Power Query ought to be fairly straightforward. By “processing timesheets” I am primarily thinking about records of hours worked that feed into payroll or job costing calculations.
Continue reading “Processing timesheets with Power Query – what about the human factor?”
Purchase order systems suck for most users within the average organisation and also their suppliers.
Continue reading “Why purchase order systems suck”
“Well, you know, it is month end”, I say, and colleagues nod sympathetically and steer clear for a while. For most non-finance types, it’s a mysterious process that seems to cause a lot of stress. For finance types, it is a beast to be tamed.
By “month end” or “month end close”, I’m referring to the process by which a month (or other period) is brought to an end in the financial system. This means trying to get the numbers as accurate as possible for some sort of eventual output. This could be management accounts, a report for a funder, a VAT return or just the sense of achievement and closure.
It means making sure you have accounted for all the expenditure and income for that month. Depending on the organisation you may also carry out certain “month end” tasks such as calculating depreciation, reconciling the bank and other balance sheet accounts.
In this post I set out a few things to consider which might make a month end less stressful.
Continue reading “Why is month end such a hassle?”
Like many finance professionals, I began my career in audit. Here are five things that I learned from auditing and still use many years later.
Continue reading “Five things I learned from auditing”
Because I was once an auditor, I have an obsession with useless controls. This is where an organisation makes you do something which they think is providing some kind of internal control. However, when you think about it in more depth, you realise it isn’t providing any control at all.
I had locked myself out of the online portal for an old pension scheme. I rang up and gave my account number. They asked for my full address as a security measure before they reset my account.
Continue reading “Useless Controls”
Sometimes external circumstances force process improvement upon you.
Businesses across the world are changing rapidly to deal with the enormity of the changes that the plague has thrust upon us. Customer interactions and supply chains have transformed overnight.
Meanwhile, in the domestic sphere, I have achieved a reduction in a routine task from approx 3 hours a week to just half an hour. The task?
Shopping.
Continue reading “Process Improvement: the weekly shop”
Balance sheet reconciliations are a key component of regular accounting to ensure that your transactions are correct. They help you detect issues such as missing transactions or failure of controls or process. This article sets out what they are, what they’re for and how to do them.
Continue reading “Balance Sheet Reconciliations”