Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

Total Impact of Best Practices on the Filing Function

This section groups together all of the best practices described in this chapter and shows how they can be applied in a typical corporate environment. As opposed to the best practices in most other chapters of this book, all of the filing best practices can be installed together, for they are not mutually exclusive. They tend to cluster into two categories: those concerned with the reduction of manual filing labor and those intended to completely avoid filing by using a company’s computer system as the primary data storage point. Though the computer system is obviously the more advanced and efficient method of storage, it takes a long time to convert a company entirely to that storage medium (if only because of employee resistance), so it is recommended that all of the best practices, including those for manual filing, be implemented.

As noted in Exhibit 10.4, there are six best practices associated with the manual filing function. Some involve cleaning up the work area by either moving old documents off-site or by using a document-destruction policy to entirely eliminate them. Other best practices eliminate documents before they ever have a chance to be filed, by such means as stopping the use of reports and reducing the number of form copies. The other main category of best practices assumes that there will be less need for filing work if documents are stored in a company’s computer system. If so, the main focus is on increasing ...