Most finance operations documentation fails for a handful of repeated reasons: it describes what someone meant to do rather than what they actually do, it has no named owner, it lives somewhere nobody looks, it names tools and screens instead of steps and decisions,...
An accounts receivable follow-up routine is a written, fixed sequence of contacts about an open invoice: the same contacts in the same order, each with a named person who makes it, each one written down in one place, and a defined point where the matter stops being a...
A clean chart of accounts is a short list of accounts with names that follow one convention, a single named person who controls what gets added, a written route for retiring an account nobody uses, and a one-page document that says what each account is for. Keeping it...
A budget versus actual review is a short, fixed meeting where the people who own each part of the plan compare what was planned with what happened, and every difference that matters gets one written line of explanation with a name against it. Run it on the same agenda...
A month-end close checklist is a written list of every task that has to happen between the end of a period and the moment someone says the books are closed, in the order those tasks happen, with a named owner against each one. To build one, write down what your close...