I work for a small company and have been asked to assist with a project centered around improvement of billing processes - I'm looking for some insight into bookkeeping best practices, as I do not have prior experience with accounting/finance. Currently, we maintain at least four spreadsheets with portions of our billing and basic customer account related data - in addition to manually entering the same information into a system of record (Great Plains). The rationale for maintaining the spreadsheets is that we have a way to cross-check the data in Great Plains. I'd love input regarding the validity of this process (which is quite cumbersome, especially as the company expands) as well as error-prevention best practices.
Record Keeping - Billing Best Practices
Answers
This is a tough one to give advice on without seeing exactly how things are set up. A question that comes to mind immediately for me is why don't you trust what is in Great Plains? Are the excel files being used as a backup? Is your instance of GP backup up to a cloud location somewhere in case of data loss?
Best practice is to get permissions set up on user profiles who are able to modify info in the accounting system, and also ensure they have proper training on what should be changed and when - in a standardized way.
But again, this may not be relevant advice for you, hard to say.
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Accounting