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Closing the Year | How to Successfully Manage Your Finance Team

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article |Closing the Fiscal Year|Closing the Year | How to Successfully Manage Your Finance TeamIf the month-end close is like game day for the finance and accounting department, closing out the fiscal year is the World Series. There’s so much to do in a limited time and, in most companies, this is done with a smaller team than you’d like. There’s a lot of pressure and that can lead to a lot of stress.

A successful close isn’t just about managing the process but about managing your team and your time to make the best use of resources. Anything you can do to become more efficient will reduce the workload on your finance team, and make the close less stressful.

The Benefits of a Great Close

The perfect year-end close is a win/win for your organization. By wrapping up quickly and accurately, you’re able to move on to reporting and generate high-quality financial statements. This helps management plan and strategize and benefit stakeholders.

Closing efficiently also benefits your finance and accounting team, because they’ll avoid long, stressful days and get back to their day-to-day process sooner. A well-documented close also makes both internal and external audits easier and less disruptive.

Here are some steps you can take to successfully manage your team for a great close with less stress:

Automate As Much as Possible

Technology really is a beautiful thing. When it comes to closing the books, there are some powerful tech tools to help automate the process. The more manual entry work you’re doing, the longer the close will take and the higher the risk of mistakes.

Of course, not everything can be automated, but you can leverage technology to give you more time for key tasks. Automate as much of the close as possible so your team is fresh and focused on the strategic pieces that require them to be at their best. This can also greatly reduce the emotional toll of the close by allowing people to go home on time and shortening the total length of the close.

Front Load Your Workload

Reconciliations are an important part of the close, and they can also be a very time-consuming part. In keeping with our last tip, leverage technology to automate your reconciliations if possible.

Try to locate steps in the close that can be done early. You don’t have to be in full “close mode” ahead of time, but if one or two people on the team can get some steps out of the way, you’ll be able to cut time off the big project once you ramp up for the close.

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

Teamwork is crucial during a challenge like the year-end close. And this year brings extra challenges to many teams who are working remotely due to the pandemic. This makes collaboration and communication more important than ever before.

Hopefully, you’re reading this while you still have a little time before the close. Take that time to stop, look at your current communications and collaboration tools and methods, and make sure they’re working for you. The middle of the year-end close is no time to find out that your team is out of sync.

Get feedback from your team and make sure everyone knows his or her role, who to reach out to for the inputs they need, and who is waiting and depending on their outputs to move forward. Smooth out any wrinkled now, before it’s too late.

While it’s very possible to spend too much time in meetings, make sure everyone on the team feels heard and has the chance to voice concerns or ask questions. You may want to take a few minutes for a virtual “stand up” each morning just to check in and ensure everyone on the team has a direction for the day and has the information they need to move the close forward.

Check the Checklist Off Your List

If you aren’t already working with a close checklist, now is the time to start. Put together a list that shows every step of the close process, which steps are dependent on others, and the order of the workflow.

Ideally, your team can view and edit the checklist in real-time so they’ll always know the progress of the close. Cloud-based close software can be a huge help here.

The close checklist isn’t just a way to track what’s been done, it’s also a powerful accountability tool. By signing off on the list, team members take ownership of each step in the close.

At first, accountability may not sound like a stress-reduction strategy, but it is. When each step in the close is owned by a specific person, you always know who to clarify with if there’s any confusion. This helps your team avoid wasted time and duplicated efforts, which can seriously reduce anxiety.

Practice Makes Perfect

Going back to our Superbowl analogy, the year-end close has a lot in common with the monthly close. That makes the month-end a great time to dial in your process, identify any bottlenecks, and prepare for a successful year-end close. By improving your monthly close, you’re also going into the end of the year with fewer surprises and fewer loose ends.

Conclusion

By following a plan, documenting your efforts, and improving your close process each and every period, you can help your finance team close successfully without unnecessary stress.

5 Tactics For Maximizing Business Productivity

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StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business Productivity|5 Tactics For Maximizing Business ProductivityDisaster! That is what happens when a business is unproductive. This is because whatever product or service your business outputs takes money to create. Therefore, if you are doing this in an inefficiently, it will be costing you money, the very lifeblood of your company. With that in mind, it’s crucial that you maximize the productivity of your company. A topic you can find out more about in the post below.

Improve employee wellbeing

Now, you may expect an article all about boosting productivity to take about rationalization and process flows, and that is to come, but your employee’s wellbeing and happiness is essential here too. The reason being that morale is crucial to maintain a high level of productivity, as well as to avoid slow down when valued staff leave.

To that end, it’s essential that you care, not only about the work your employees do but their wellbeing as well. Luckily there are some relatively small changes you can make in your business to improve wellbeing that will allow you to reap the associated reward in productivity.

The first is to offer flexible working hours and locations, something that can help your staff achieve a better work-life balance, and so be more productive and motivated when they are working.

Additionally, instituting a wellbeing program in work can have a significant effect. Of course, the exact form of these will differ from one workspace to another, but many companies find that providing exercise classes, meditation sessions, and even healthy snacks to be very useful in upping morale.

Deal with issues before they become problems

Next, if you want to boost productivity in your business, you need to change the way that your entire company operates. In fact, you need to move from being reactive when problems occur to being proactive instead.

This means that you need to put systems in place that monitor what is happening in your business, and will pick up any issues that have the potential to become something more damaging. The idea being that you can then deal with and resolve them before they ever blow up to be a significant obstacle. Then you can avoid downtime and the bottlenecking of tasks that are associated with a major crisis.

In fact, this is a philosophy that you can use across many different aspects of your business to improve productivity. One example of this being managed IT services.

Of course, you may be asking what is managed IT services, and how can they help my business be more productive? Well, don’t panic because it’s actually a straightforward question to answer. Managed IT services are where you outsource your IT provision to an organization that takes over the proactive monitoring side of things for you. Something that can help your business because it means a vast reduction in network downtime and the associated hold-ups in working, communications, and even hits on your website. Thus ensuring maximum productivity.

Automate

Another way that you can maximize your business’s productive it to take a long hard look at the type of tasks that your employees do day in day out. In fact, when you do, so it’s likely that you will find many repetitive jobs that are done over and over again, and it is with these that you can begum automating things.

Yes, that right, you can easily free up your workers to focus on more important things, by automating some of the most basic tasks that need to be done in your business. Something that should help to improve productivity because you have more person-power to give to the jobs that genuinely need it.

In fact, automation can be done in a range of situation from the factory floor, to the stockroom, and even in the office with specialized software. Something that makes it a fanatics way of maximizing your company’s productivity.

Minimize distractions / maximize focus

Of course, we humans don’t do as well as physical robots or AI at being 100% focused all the time. In fact, focus and being distracted from it can be a major issue in many businesses that contributes to time wasted and reduced productivity. That is why it’s crucial that you change the way your organization deals with these opposing forces.

Now, to do this, it is essential to acknowledge that as humans, we need distraction as well as focus to work efficiently and retain the quality of the work we are producing. With that in mind, encouraging a time-batching system like the Pomodoro Method can be incredibly helpful, as they allow for small restorative distraction breaks, but also keep most people on task for the majority of the time.

However, that doesn’t mean that unnecessary distraction cannot be abolished, and in particular constant email access and use can be a real time and focus drain in the office. Something that may mean scheduling emails time into the am and pm is a much better way of managing such a task and so boosting productivity.

StrategyDriven Managing Your People Article |Business Productivity|5 Tactics For Maximizing Business ProductivityReview Processes

Finally, when it comes to maximizing productivity, reviewing and improving the processes that you use in your business is always helpful. The idea here being to remove any redundant actions and so streamline what you are doing.

Of course, this is often easiest to do when it comes to things like a production line of the factory floor, but that doesn’t mean that you can take a rationalized perspective to other business related tasks as well. In fact, it is entirely possible to make things more efficient in places like the office or even a store by realizing what time is being wasted and changing things to rectify this.

In particular, an example of this that nearly every type of business can benefit from is to reduce the volume and frequency of meetings that they have. In fact, instead of spending days rushing from one meeting to another, it can work well to hold a short stand up briefing at the beginning of the day. This being something that will save time, and prevent distraction from the critical tasks in hand and so maximize productivity in your business.

How to Maintain Quality While Expanding Your Lawn Care Business

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Lawn Care|How to Maintain Quality While Expanding Your Lawn Care BusinessWhen your business is successful, it’s natural to want it to grow, and that’s no different in the lawn care business. After all, with so many happy customers under your belt, there’s no reason to deprive potential new clients of your skillfully manicured lawns and pristinely trimmed hedges. However, there are a lot of things to consider when it comes to expanding your business and maintaining excellent service as you do it.

With a growing customer list comes an increasingly complicated schedule. Scaling your business takes a lot of time, effort, and money. However, with the right resources and a little bit of advice, you can make sure to address every business growth necessity without putting a strain on your business operations- or your mental health.

There are plenty of ways to make sure your company stays on track as it grows. Take a look at some of our suggestions below and make sure expansion doesn’t come at the expense of quality.

Improve Communications

Staying in touch with customers and employees alike is vitally important to any business, but especially when it comes to the lawn care industry. With plenty of workers out in the field and clients spread out across a neighborhood, or even an entire city, being able to communicate effectively and efficiently is an absolute necessity.

With lawn care software, that’s exactly what you’ll be able to do. These handy platforms are designed to make it as easy as possible to get in touch with field workers, customers, and even new clients, so that your business will scale without any growing pains. Rescheduled appointment? Let the lawn care technician know in real-time. Employee running a bit late? Send a notification to the customer so they don’t call your business angry. It’s a win-win!

Keep Track with Care

There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to expanding your lawn care business, and there’s nothing worse than losing track of valuable assets, time, and even employees at any point during that process. After all, you don’t exactly have resources to spare when it comes to scaling, so every last bit can help a whole lot.

The right lawn care software platform will help you keep track of everything you can imagine when it comes to running your business. It allows you to schedule workers to a job, and track how far they are from arriving via GPS. Most even have route optimization capabilities so you can get them there as fast as possible. Plus, with advanced customer profiles, you’ll be able to keep track of how often a client utilizes your services and send reminders when they’re likely in need of another trim.

While not necessarily standard in all lawn care software, some of the more advanced iterations will even allow you to track chemical usage. This allows you to have an in-depth picture of what kind of equipment you need for a job and when you need to restock.

Focus on Customer Service

In any field service industry, you need to focus on customer service. Considering a negative review can take your business from customer favorite to neighborhood pariah, it’s important to make sure you’re keeping customers happy no matter how much you’re trying to handle your business expansion.

Again, a good lawn care software can help you do just that. You’ll not only be able to field customer complaints in an organized and efficient manner, but you’ll also have the communication tools at your fingertips to keep customers and employees in the know when they need to be.

Prioritize Efficiency

The final key to successfully expanding your business is efficiency. If you want to handle more clients without increasing your overhead along with it, you’re going to have to be as efficient as possible across your many departments.

We can’t overstate the value of lawn care software in this instance. It’s specifically designed to streamline business operations and improve productivity, whether it’s in servicing current clients or even marketing to new ones. Simply put, it’s 2020, and the best way to make an impact on your business is with lawn care software.

How To Choose Your Company’s Staff

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It is always said that the success of a company comes from its human capital. However, one wonders how the most recognized companies achieved such an efficient human resources department. Any entrepreneur should pay attention to this point because recruiting staff is a fundamental task in an organization.

StrategyDriven Talent Management Article | How To Choose Your Company's Staff

Finding the ideal professional for the position is often difficult. The reasons may be lack of experience or that the candidate does not have the required skills. Some companies have periods with constant staff turnover because it is difficult for them to locate the right employees, keep workers happy and satisfied with their work and wages.

Personnel recruiters must be specialists because they must know how to combine intuition with the ability to analyze, synthesize and evaluate, and involve quantitative scientific tools, which contribute to knowing what is not seen with the naked eye. The use of technological tools will help obtain greater accuracy and know the applicant’s scope.

Posting job advertisements in the correct places (according to the requested profile) makes the offer more attractive; therefore, the chances that the candidates will be fixed are higher. At the same time, the design of the ad also serves to attract attention. Take advantage of social networks, especially those of professionals like LinkedIn, so that you can learn more about people’s likes and interests in less time. It makes your searches more effective too and you can get a general overview quicker.

When conducting job interviews, it is essential to provide information on the specific skills and abilities. It is also valuable for the company to report what it has to offer by working there, for example, salary, hours, incentives, or rewards, and all benefits. Look at drug testing to ensure that you hire people who have no history of narcotics or drug abuse. You can look at stewarts drug testing for further information.

Look at the company’s goals.

Also, to have a good team that meets the company’s goals, we have some ideas that will help you select the candidates who are applying. Take note: Psychometric tests are part of job interviews. They are made scientifically, and it is an objective measure of the candidate’s behavior, which allows us to conclude the factors of his personality. They are easy to acquire and can be the first step in determining the applicant’s ability. You want to hire someone who has the potential for growth in the business.

When selecting people, use comments from their other jobs, who they worked with, colleagues, or previous bosses. Therefore, factual information is obtained on the skills and personality at work. At the end of the list of possible workers, it is advisable to carry out a socio-economic study and a personal interview. It will allow knowing the environment in which the candidate develops, how his family conditions, the place where they live, customs, habits, personal and professional information. With this data, unwanted situations can be avoided. You can certainly hire the best professional but the hard work is up to you.

Starting A Small Construction Business

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Being handy with tools can provide more benefits than simply keeping your home in good repair. Using your skills and experience to develop your own construction business can provide a source of income that allows you to be your own boss and set your own hours. Even though your future business is small, it requires careful planning and organization to increase the chances of success. Like other types of small businesses, small construction companies must follow regulations and work hard to earn a customer’s trust.

StrategyDriven Starting Your Business Article | Starting A Small Construction Business

Plan well

Write a plan for your business. Known as a business plan, this written document provides a roadmap to get your business started. Include your goals and outline the methods you will use to achieve those goals. It includes sections that deal with the financial aspects of your business, the intended clientele, the necessary tools, the equipment, and supplies, as well as the advertising plans. Print your business plan on paper to present it formally.

Apply for a loan to obtain any necessary financing for your new company. Take your formal business plan with you to present to the banker. Talk about your reasons for starting a construction business, including why you think you will be successful. Talk about your loan options, including interest rates and terms.

Check regulations

You may need to be part of a union, so look for information on how to acquire a construction license or membership. Look for services in your area, how to apply for a business license, register your business name, and pay licensing and certification fees. Request a company identification number through the Internal Revenue Service. Contact a surety company to request one.

Take an inventory of tools and equipment. Bring any tools or equipment you have to repair, in case they need it. Buy the items you need to complete basic construction tasks, such as ladders, saws, carpenters’ levels, drills, and bits. Do you need any specialist tools and products, such as ptfe tubing or corrugated pipes?

Advertise your new construction company in various media to attract customers. Advertise discounts to your first customers in a business. Notify your friends, neighbors, and family of your new company. Ask them to spread the word to their friends and co-workers. Personal recommendations can encourage homeowners to go inside their homes for construction work. It would help if you came up with a strategy on how to advertise your construction company. You may want to start a website that contains information about your company and how different they are from other contractors. You can also use traditional advertising methods such as printing business cards, flyers, and brochures – make sure you include a reference to your website.

Starting a construction business can be profitable and exciting, but it does take work. The risk of failure can be carefully minimized by considering a). where you will receive funds b). what you will do when accidents occur c). who you will hire to help you d). how you will bid on projects, and e) how to find your customers.