How to Improve Your Finance Department, Tips for Small Businesses

Your finance department is certainly one of the cogs of business success. They handle key tasks like budgeting, payroll processing, bookkeeping, tax management, strategic planning, and much more. As a small business owner or manager, you should appreciate that these tasks are not easy! You should equip your finance team to make them much more efficient. Let us explore some of the key ways you can better your financial team on a budget.

Tips to make your financial department team better

Upskill your finance team

Making sure that the people in charge of your business accounts are proficient, highly competent, and qualified for their work is a step into better financial management in your startup. As such, you should invest in the training of your finance team. This will enable them to keep up with any internal functions smoothly. For example, they will be in a position to operate efficiently any finance tools that may be implemented by your company.

There is a lot of periodic training that should be able to sharpen their financial management skills including:

In-house seminars to increase awareness of financial procedures and policies
External professional conferences
Cross-training: This is specifically important when there is a need for a junior officer to take over from a senior officer for various reasons.

The bottom line is that investing in the training of your staff will improve their work efficiency and therefore increase productivity in your business.

Design and implement financial policies and procedures

You should have accounting policies and procedures in place that you should hand over to your finance team to follow. The approved standard procedures should be followed during all financial transactions by your accountants and the team. For example, you should ensure that payrolls, credit management, and invoice processing are done on time without delay to increase the efficiency of the department.

Also, make sure that there are procedures in place to guide your account officers in collecting bad debts and late payments from clients. This will help that you will maintain a positive cash flow leading to better performance of your business. Remember, it is your role as the business owner or manager to develop and implement policies for your finance team to follow.

Interlink your finance department with other departments

The proper functioning of your finance department will be dependent on how well it collaborates with other departments. Your finance team cannot work in isolation, as data from other departments is needed. For example, in processing payslips, data about employees from the Human Resource department will be needed. Similarly, data from the sales and marketing department will be necessary for compiling accounts on sales and so on.

Well, gathering this data and processing manually is time-consuming and tedious. This is where technology comes in handy. Let us expound more.

Use proper technique in your finance department

Using the right technology for your business will make accounting work easier and more accurate, plus it will make collaboration with other departments easier. For starters, you will need the right hardware and IT infrastructure management software set up for use in the finance department. The infrastructure will help set up a baseline for operations in the department.

This is essential in keeping your financial data safe, and hence you will not have to worry about cybercrime. Remember, cybercriminals are always targeting data in your business. So, you literally have no option but to secure your business from targeted attacks. You can also deploy cloud computing that makes critical accounting data accessible from anywhere by the team.

You should also use computerized accounting systems to increase convenience in finance. It makes processes like recording, storing, analyzing, and reporting financial information far much easier. Accounting systems can also be utilized in managing and submitting such accounts as tax returns. It has lots of other benefits:

Reducing the time spent on manual processing
Minimizes accounting errors
Makes available real-time financial information

Fine-tune communication

Communication is another fundamental in advancing the vision and mission of your business, including the finance team. It is, therefore, vital that you get to communicate your expectations with your team. You should also explain clearly the roles that they should execute. In the end, you will have a win for your company by ensuring that everything is running smoothly in the department.

Wrap up

In a nutshell, you should invest in improving your finance functions if you are to improve your overall business efficacy. So, try to invest in your staff and ensure you use the right tech to fine-tune processes.