Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

Preface

The accounting department is a cost center. It does not directly generate revenues, but rather provides a fixed set of services to the rest of the company, and is asked to do so at the lowest possible cost. Consequently, the accounting staff is called upon to process transactions, write reports, create new processes or investigate old ones—while doing so as an ever-shrinking proportion of total corporate expenses.

This cost-based environment is a very difficult one for most accountants, for their training is primarily in accounting rules and regulations, rather than in how to run a very specialized department in a cost-effective manner. They find a few ideas for improvements from attending seminars or perusing accounting or management magazines, but there is no centralized source of information for them to consult that itemizes a wide array of possible improvements. Hence the need for the fifth edition of Accounting Best Practices, which contains 395 accounting best practices, of which 61 are new to this edition.

This book is compiled from the author’s lengthy experience in setting up and operating a number of accounting departments, as well as by providing consulting services to other companies. Accordingly, it contains a blend of best practices from a wide variety of accounting environments, ranging from small partnerships to multibillion-dollar corporations. This means that not all of the best practices described within these pages will be useful in every situation—some ...