How to avoid the twenty major mistakes corporate accountants commonly make every year

Corporate accountants around the world have been making the same mistakes, year-in year-out. Why is it that we spend months on an annual planning process that we know is flawed? Why is it we spend many days preparing a monthly report that is informing management well and truly “after the horse has bolted”? Why do we produce a 30+ page finance report for the senior management team? Why do we budget at account code level?

With the economic downturn corporate accountants need to find more time to help their businesses in a more proactive way.  This whitepaper will enlighten and encourage controllers, CFOs, management and financial accountants to avoid these major mistakes.

The whitepaper will cover how to avoid the mistakes which include:

1. Having over 80 account codes for the P/L
2. Only forecasting to year-end
3. Breaking down the annual plan into twelve before the year starts
4. Giving budget holders an annual entitlement
5. Budgeting at account code level
6. Taking months doing an annual plan –instead of 10 working days!
7. Producing numbing monthly financial reports
8. Reporting on the wrong performance measures
9. Not producing daily/ weekly decision based reports
10. Selling change by logic
11. Allowing month-end reporting to go past three working days
12. sing Julius Caesar’s calendar as a reporting tool
13. Spending months on the annual accounts
14. Investing in a complex G/L and upgrading unnecessarily
15. Letting Excel dominate the finance system
16. Working hard but not smart
17. Not investing enough in Accounts Payable
18. Not adopting the purchase card – a free AP system
19. Not investing effort and time into leadership
20. Not celebrating enough