ACCOUNTING BEST PRACTICES FOR NONPROFITS

Before deciding on the outsourcing route, one must consider a variety of impor- tant issues that make this a solution for only a minority of situations. The first prob- lem is cost. It is always cheaper to keep the collections function in-house because the fees charged by any supplier must inc[r]

(c) Many Leaps of Faith
As stated earlier, many of the changes that companies have to make to suc- cessfully implement a lean strategy are counter to what most people have been taught and what they have practiced. Some of those changes are dramatically different and can make a CEO hesitate for<[r]

Companies with traditional performance measures that adopt the BSC must add a number of nonfinancial measures, but they may keep their existing tra- ditional financial measures. The BSC does not affect the core transaction pro- cessing systems and cost systems. Accountants may find the BSC attractiv[r]

hand, for local customers GTI is underspending on delivering service to these attributes, reducing customer value and satisfaction with the company’s service. As company spending begins to align with customer preferences, it gains a strategic advantage that translates into improved profitab[r]

While most people acknowledge the need to back up innovations with re- sources, they may not be as aware of what happens when they do not. In a clas- sic example, data analysis revealed to a team of machine operators charged with reducing scrap at their work stations that one very manageable source[r]

In Toyota plants, all information needed to control operations is in the work simply because all work flows continuously at a balanced rate through virtu- ally every operation, from the beginning to the end of the manufacturing process. The work has been carefully designed so that one can “see” its[r]

Payment Corporation’s www.directdeposit.com; its Web Direct Deposit product
allows one to download payroll information from such popular accounting programs as QuickBooks, Peachtree, and DacEasy, and transmit this information to a direct deposit processing center that handles all direct dep[r]

◆ Continue to retrofit all the new data with your company’s legacy based reporting framework.
◆ Restate your older data with a new, modern attire.
Somehow, I think you’ll want to opt for the latter approach. Doing so makes more sense, though it’s not so simple. To begin with, there are to[r]

Cost: Installation time:
10–14 Eliminate Reports
Most companies are awash in reports. Typically, someone asks the accounting department to generate a report, which it does—and continues to do for the fore- seeable future because no one has told it to stop doing so. The majority of[r]

The solution is to follow an ongoing program of auditing bills of material. By doing so, errors are flushed out of the bills, resulting in better inventory quantity data, which in turn results in more accurate financial statements. The best way to implement bill audits is to tie them to the p[r]

Upgrade Tools
There are a number of tools that you can leverage to help in planning for your upgrade. They include: Best Practices Analyzer and SQL Upgrade Advisor .
Running the Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005 o[r]

However, it is important to realize that the preceding code listing is not defensive—it does nothing to prevent the exceptional circumstance from occurring, and its only effect is to allow the system to continue operating, pretending that nothing bad has happened. Exception hiding such as this[r]

wife cajoled and prodded the author to achieve the target, the author simply could not achieve this desired result. The author’s system is incapable of pro- ducing the desired result. There are two problems with this management-by- edict approach: First, the author’s system design is such that he[r]

for an item when it first enters the warehouse, then all transactions later using
that bar code will also be incorrect—a clear case of technology increasing the
rate of transaction errors, rather than the reverse. However, one can mitigate this problem by setting the bar code printer to[r]

Best Practices for Naming Variables and Functions
Top software engineers know that good variable, function (or method), and class names are necessary for the maintainability of the code. A good name is one that conveys meaning related to the named function, object, clas[r]

New technology makes it possible for some companies to completely bypass this problem. If a company has its own delivery staff, it can equip them with portable computers and printers and have them issue invoices at the point of receipt, using the quantities counted by the customer as the appr[r]

A legitimate way to retain cash for an extra day or two is to use controlled disbursements. This best practice is based on the principle of mail float, which means that one can print and immediately mail a check to pay for an invoice on its due date, and the supplier can recei[r]

Too often, a budget manager assembles all of the information needed to create the annual budget, has done so with days to spare, and yet somehow cannot release the budget on time. The reason is that the budget pieces cannot be easily put together, requiring a great deal of labor to rekey them all in[r]

Though it is not possible to completely eliminate all management of the inter- nal audit function, a controller or chief financial officer can outsource the function, which removes selected management tasks. For example, giving all internal audit work to an outside supplier keeps a manager fr[r]

Another problem is that there are intercompany payments between sub- sidiaries located in different countries; these transactions should be netted to arrive at the minimum possible flow of foreign exchange.
To take advantage of these offsetting positions, a company needs to central- ize its foreig[r]