Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

13–7. Post the Policies and Procedures Manual on the Company Intranet Site

When the accounting staff is widely scattered through many locations, it is difficult to make available to them a current version of the accounting policies and procedures manual. This can be a real problem, for the accounting department is much more procedurally driven than any other department, and operating with antiquated procedures can cause significant differences in operations between various locations. Traditionally, this problem has been addressed by creating an internal procedure-writing and publishing department that constantly updates documents, maintains a list of authorized recipients, and mails the changed documents to them. This group is expensive, and does not always result in updated manuals at outlying locations, especially if those outlying personnel take a dim view of spending their valuable time replacing pages in their procedures manuals.

A significant improvement on this method is to convert each page of the manual into an HTML or Adobe Acrobat format, so that it can be posted directly to the corporate intranet site. By doing so, there is no need to publish and distribute any more paper-based documents. In addition, an on-line index allows users to quickly search through the database to find the exact procedural references they need. In addition, there is no longer a need to gradually compile a lengthy list of procedure changes and then issue all of the changes at the same time; instead, ...