A good solution is to selectively upgrade key processes with best practices. However, the selection of which best practices to install is crucial. First, a few quick successes are important to build morale and prove to the rest of the company that you have the ability to fix the department. This calls for a few minor enhancements that can be completed immediately, such as stopping the time-consuming filing of extra customer invoice copies.

Stopping the filing of excess paperwork may hardly appear to be a best practice. The common misperception of a best practice is a cutting edge, advanced technological experiment only engaged in by the largest companies  In reality, a best practice is relative to a company's current situation -- anything not yet installed that would improve the company should be considered a best practice. Once it has been installed, there are likely to be more advanced solutions available that should then be considered the next logical step in a progression of incremental improvements.

To return to our scenario, your early successes have the company beginning to believe you just might be good enough, so you can start installing best practices that involve a modest expenditure and require some cooperation from other departments. It is still necessary to work on short-duration projects, since a steady stream of successes are necessary to improve the common perception of your abilities.  Examples of good best practices for this stage of department improvement are working with the sales manager to streamline the commission structure or posting employee payroll forms on an intranet site.

Only after you have built up goodwill throughout the department and company should you embark on a best practice project of significant size, cost, or duration. By waiting until this point to do so, you will also know which employees are best able to complete these projects, and will have enhanced your knowledge of any company politics that may interfere with a successful completion. Examples of projects falling into this improvement phase are the creation of a data warehouse or creating an online purchasing catalog.

By following this incremental improvement approach you can gradually bring the accounting department's performance up to an acceptable level and eventually become the highest-performing department in the company.

An ongoing problem is finding best practices to install. A good source is your own staff. The people who process transactions all day are clearly the experts in those areas, so spend plenty of time with them, and ask their opinion about what should be done. Not only will they have ideas, but this is also a great way to meet your new staff. Another source is your auditors, who review other accounting operations all the time, and who may have suggestions. Yet another source is articles and advertisements in accounting publications, such as The CPA Journal, CFO, or Strategic Finance.  A less productive source of information is accounting conferences; someone presenting at a conference typically is discussing world-class solutions that are difficult and expensive to install. 

STEVEN M. BRAGG, CPA, CMA, CIA, CPM, CPIM, has been the chief financial officer or controller of four companies, as well as a consulting manager at Ernst & Young. He received a master's degree in finance from Bentley College, an MBA from Babson College, and a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of Maine. He is also the author of Accounting Best Practices, Third Edition (Wiley, 2003). He resides in Englewood, Colorado.