Accounting Best Practices

Best practices are a set of steps with proven results to accomplish specific tasks. Over the years, different professions have developed best practices as a way to standardize and achieve positive outcomes for their departments and companies.

Steven M. Bragg is a top expert in identifying, assessing, and recommending best practices for accountants. He has served as a Chief Financial Officer for several firms and served as a consulting manager for Ernst & Young and auditor for Deloitte and Touche. Bragg’s books include, appropriately, accounting best-sellers Accounting Best Practices and Accounting Control Best Practices.

Bragg’s definition of a best practice is a broad one—any improvement over existing practices. This broadness gives accounting managers the freedom to cast a wide net when searching for efficiencies. Accountants, Bragg points out, are not trained to use cost-effective measures to run their departments. They are trained to implement the strategies laid out by their chief executive officers.

Bragg’s wide-net approach suits a profession that requires a lot of attention to detail, and this is where accountants can identify best practices. As Bragg points out, they can find them by making relatively minor adjustments, such as switching to blanket purchase orders and using signature stamps.

Accountants who look for best practices will inevitably find them, particularly after they see the positive, time-saving effects of ideas Bragg offers, such as streamlining payroll procedures or creating databases that list standard contract terms.

Even more encouraging is the fact that best practices do not require approval from above. They can be seamlessly incorporated into normal procedures. Bragg points out that best practices also link functions together to improve overall operations. They are key contributors to a company’s overall success, and essential for a corporate strategy to work.

“By implementing a plethora of best practices,” Bragg writes, “a company can greatly improve its level of efficiency and information reporting, which fits nicely into the requirements of most strategic plans.”

Accountants are the guardians of corporation financials. It is in their best interests to identify and implement best practices that nudge their profession into more efficient operating modes. They just might be in the best position to set an example that greater efficiencies do not have to translate into budget cuts.

Bragg, Stephen. Accounting Best Practices. John Wiley & Sons, 2007. Excerpts provided on Google Books. Web. 5 April 2011.