Index To Practical & Procedural Guidance Articles:
All subscriber plans have full access to our critical accounting and finance procedure guidance articles.
Month-End Close & Accounting Controls:
Balance Sheet Control - This guidance explains the importance of monthly balance sheet account reconciliations and will walk you through the recommended steps to use our account reconciliation worksheets.
In order to properly close your financial books each month, it is critical that you are confident in the validity of the assets and liabilities reflected on your company’s balance sheet.
The last thing you want are unsupported assets or unrecognized liabilities on your balance sheet that will affect your future operating results!
We will refer to the various balance sheet account reconciliations Excel templates that we offer on this site and that are specifically built (with sample data) to show the best way to explain the balances and activity by type of balance sheet account.
Month-End Close Priorities - This guidance provides a proposed priority list for your month-end close process to best organize your efforts chronologically to lead to an accurate and efficient close.
Your month-end financial close process is critical to your accounting department’s success as well as the success of the company. The more efficient your month-end close process, the more accurate and timely the financial statements will be for your company to make decisions based upon.
In this article, we will describe the critical components of a successful month-end close process as well as helping you prioritize the steps chronologically to achieve a more accurate and efficient close process.
Methods to Close Your Books Faster - Provides general guidance on ideas to shave days off of your monthly close process.
In this article we provide the guidance for various month-end tools as well as methods to produce a faster close process and quicker delivery of financial statements while still maintaining accuract financial reports. We continue to add to these articles as we receive feedback from customers and new ideas so please refer back for updates.
Analysis & Decision Making Tool Articles:
Choosing the Right General Ledger Software - This article walks you through the importance of choosing the right general ledger software system for your company at its current life cycle and how to use our GL Software Decision Tool matrix to assist you in narrowing down your choice of 15 top GL software programs currently in the market.
In this article, I will go through the different criteria you should consider as you try to decide which program is best for you. These criteria are the same that are included in our GL Software Decision Tool on this site that compares your responses to these criteria against 15 of the most popular and renowned systems in the market today. After you read this article, we recommend you go through our GL software tool to see which of these programs best meet your needs as it would be a great jumping off point for you to narrow the list down a bit before you reach out to the software providers for discussions and demos.
Lease Analysis & Negotiation - A discussion of the current steps to analyze any of your existing or upcoming equipment leases to confirm if they are operating or capital leases. You can also walk through our Capital Lease Test Tool for a quick review of any lease you are looking at and our Capital Test Lease Model is very powerful to use when analyzing AND negotiating a lease as it can save you hundreds of dollars by negotiating down the lessor’s lease rate factor.
This article not only explains the steps on testing your leases to confirm if they are “Capital” or “Operating” but also walks you through our Lease Analysis Tool and how to properly use it. Even better, this articles shows you how to use this same model as a “Lease vs. Buy” model as well as how to use the model to strongly negotiate far better lease terms and a lower lease rate factor by leveraging the model as a negotiation tool. We have saved thousands in lease costs by this method as lessors always build in substantial profit in their lease factors and they are willing to negotiate!
Cash and Treasury:
Cash Management is Critical - A discussion of the critical components and steps to properly manage your entity’s cash balances on a daily basis and how to your our daily cash management worksheet tool to accomplish this efficiently.
Managing the company’s cash and treasury function is very important to the finance management staff. The last thing the finance group wants to do is to be short on cash right when payroll hits. Even if your company is doing well with its cash balance, if you do not properly manage it, you could get caught with low balances in important accounts. In addition, are you managing the surplus cash of the business in order to earn the best return on those funds?