The value of small talk

Leith Hayes of Orelia Management Systems asks some questions that every one in business should consider.

When you talk about accounts departments with business owners there is sometimes the glazed look of a deer caught in the headlights of the oncoming traffic.  Often they just do not know where to start in the quest for accounting best practices.  One of the best ways of going about this is just to ask the simple questions.

Do your accounts staff always compare the order price with invoiced price from your suppliers.  Do they even match up the purchase order numbers with the corresponding invoices?

This is a simple step and it makes it easy to compare what was ordered against what was delivered and charged for.  This also allows the questions to be raised about any necessary requests for credit that need to be processed.

At what point do we invoice the Job - is it prior to dispatch so that the invoice can go out with the goods or do we wait until the job has come through to the accounts area for invoicing?

This may seem like a small issue, but, if you think about the time lag between the job being finished and dispatched and the client receiving their bill for your services the impact on your cash flow for any given period may be significant.

Are we sure that all the jobs for this month have been invoiced yet?
A simple enough question.  Can you answer this truly and with any certainty?

Do we compare actual costs to estimated costs?
Not only should we compare the material costs against the estimated/ordered costs but we should also be checking on the time allocated to do the job.

With Quote & Print being a fully integrated MIS the ability to answer the questions above and many more that you have not thought about yet is just at the tip of your fingers.  The ease of entry for both your Debtors and Creditors invoices, credit requests, remittances, etc allows for the streamlining of many of the normal accounting processes that in the past would have been labourious at best and time wasting at worst.  The ability for all the areas of your business to "talk" to each other when producing reports at the push of a button makes the process of checking profitability easy.

Remember you do not have to wait until the end of the financial year to discover if your business has been profitable or not.

To discover the answer to these and many more questions that you haven't even asked yet please contact your local Quote & Print Distributor.