The typical accounting department issues a variety of periodic notices to employees - how to submit a check request, when timesheets are due, which website to access for electronic remittance advices, and the like. In recent years, the trend has been for accounting departments to include this type of information on the company intranet site, and assume that employees will locate it there. However, this is a passive approach - in reality, many employees will not access the intranet site, thereby burdening the accounting department with a workforce that does not know how to deal with it. Many accounting departments do not have the budgets to directly train the entire workforce, so they have no better alternative than the intranet site.
A cost-effective solution is to create a manager handbook for all company managers, and include in it all of the information needed by employees to deal with accounting transactions. By providing this manual to managers and training them in its use, the accounting staff gains a knowledgeable intermediary that can educate the rest of the workforce. This still requires some time to train managers regarding the accounting information in the manual, or any changes to it; however, the number of managers is far smaller than the entire company workforce, so this is a reasonably cost-effective solution. Better yet, it is a "push" solution, because the accounting manager is ensuring that a key group of influential employees are thoroughly familiar with accounting procedures.
At a minimum, a manager handbook should include information about the following accounting topics:
- Applying for capital purchases
- Commission calculations and payment dates
- Customer credit policy
- Expense report approvals and submissions
- Handling supplier invoices
- Payroll deductions / updates / payments
- Petty cash transactions
- Timekeeping
- Travel policies
Please note that these topics do not include human resources issues, which are normally dealt with in the employee manual.