Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

Chapter 11. Finance Best Practices

This book is primarily about improving the accounting function, not the finance function. However, this area is commonly integrated into the accounting department in smaller organizations, where the cost of a treasury staff cannot be justified. Thus, this area becomes part of the accounting function, and so a limited set of best practices are included here. They are primarily oriented toward treasury, risk management, and investor relations applications that can be located on the Internet. The reason for so many Internet-based best practices is that they can be readily accessed and used at a moderate cost, since there is no software to install on one’s computer or large up-front costs to incur. These are important issues for the controllers of smaller companies, who can quickly browse through the Web site addresses that are sprinkled throughout this chapter, and see which applications will be of the most use to them.

Only in one case is an expensive and time-consuming best practice listed—the use of a treasury workstation. It is really only cost-effective for a larger company, but is included here because it does such a good job of integrating and improving on a number of rote treasury functions. It is highly recommended for those organizations that can afford it, but its substantial cost should be carefully reviewed before a decision is made.

This chapter begins with a short review of the level of implementation difficulty for each finance best ...