One of the reasons why a smaller accounting department tends to be so heavily cluttered with paperwork is that employees are called upon to handle a multitude of tasks throughout the day – and be prepared to handle each one totally within the confines of their offices. This means that a single individual may need a multitude of computers, printers, filing cabinets and/or binders for multiple activities -- such as cash receipts processing, inventory valuation, and billing – all in one office. Switching between tasks throughout the day calls for putting away some documents, accessing others, changing accounting software modules, stocking printers with different types of forms or check stock, and other activities that increase the time needed to complete transactions. In addition, if management decides to centralize files in order to remove the clutter from each person’s office, then employees now have to walk further in order to access information for their various tasks. So, it appears that we must either tolerate cluttered offices or more employee move time – both of which increase the level of transaction processing inefficiency. Is there a better way?
We can look to the production floor for a solution. Manufacturing operations have used production cells for years in order to completely process either entire products or major subassemblies – and all with a relatively small number of people, sometimes as few as one person. A production cell includes a set of carefully positioned work stations that allow for easy sequential completion of every task needed to create a product. If we apply this approach to the accounting area, the work layout will look substantially different. For example, one office can be set up to process nothing but invoices, with the necessary filing cabinets located within that office, a computer terminal always open to the billing software module, and invoice forms always loaded into the locally-positioned printer. The same approach works for payroll, cash receipts processing, financial statement preparation, and so on.
There are some downsides to the use of production cells in accounting. For example, the smaller accounting departments to which this concept primarily applies may have as few as one employee who operates out of a single office. If so, setting up several production cells may require several offices. A possible solution is to reconfigure the work space of a single office, so that different quadrants of the office are permanently configured to handle a single accounting transaction. There may also be control problems, such as permanently leaving check stock in a printer. In this case, the solution will be a trade-off between controls (removing check stock from locked storage) and convenience (taking the chance that someone will access the check stock).