Key Staff can and will Leave your Business, are you Prepared

April 30, 2008 at 2:28 am · Filed under software

Very few businesses can claim to be prepared for the loss of key staff. Quite often it is an unexpected and unplanned for event that causes quite a bit of disruption to business as usual.

It is quite a gut wrenching experience to see someone you have worked with over a period of time leaving your business. Even if the parting of ways is on good terms with a period of handover, you just know that there is so much information walking out the door with your former employee and there is nothing you can do about it.

And this is only just the beginning

While labouring through a period of being understaffed and overworked you are then faced with the task of recruiting a new employee to fill the vacant position. This is followed by the inevitable probation and training period where, hopefully the new recruit comes up to speed and is able to pick up where the former employee left off.

The problem is: What exactly was it that the former employee really did? They always seemed to be busy and on the rare occasion that they were absent due to illness, there were those problems that arose that were only truly resolved when they returned and took control and ‘cleaned things up’.

There has to be a better way

Fortunately quite a bit can be done to minimize the impact of situations like this in our businesses. And like most truly worthwhile solutions the steps required to complete this part of your businesses development do take some effort on your part.

There is an established path that you can follow to get your business in order and the benefits to you and your people are much farther reaching than just minimizing the impact of key staff leaving you.

The following is by no means a definitive list of what is required. But it does give you some idea of the steps required.

- Create a flexible forward thinking Organization Chart defining the positions you require in your business.

- Determine what the responsibilities are for the positions in your business.
- Document key information that is critical to your business and make it available to your employees.
- Work with your people to define what it is they do, how they do it and most importantly how it could be done better. Record, optimize then implement the business systems you have identified.
- Assign the business systems to the relevant positions and monitor their use.

By consistently following these steps for all positions in your business you will insulate yourself from some of the problems that occur when key employees leave your business.

Copyright 2006 Business Systems Manager

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Knowledge Management

April 29, 2008 at 2:08 am · Filed under software

Knowledge management is an upcoming field of management, which focuses on maximizing business performance by making the most of the synergy between people, processes and technology.

It deals with issues critical to organizational adaptation, endurance and expertise in the wake of progressively more sporadic changes in the environment. In effect, it stands for organizational processes that engage a synergistic combination of data, information technology and the creativity of people. In other words, the knowledge aspect of business should be considered critical to it and should reflect in strategy, policy and practice the overall functioning of the organization.

Moreover, knowledge management is all about establishing the link between an organization’s obvious and implied intellectual property and positive business outcome.

In practice, however, it involves an organization recognizing and mapping its intellectual assets, creating knowledge for competitive advantage, making large amounts of business information available, and allocating the best practices and technology that facilitates all of the above, including groupware and intranet.

Knowledge management is not easy to define precisely or simply. It is a complex domain, like management itself. However, there are noteworthy connections between knowledge management and many popular management practices and strategies, including best practices, change management, benchmarking and risk management, to mention a few.

Largely, the business community also sees knowledge management as an accepted extension of business process reengineering. Most recent business strategies accept and recognize that information and knowledge are its assets, and policies, strategies and tools are needed in order to manage those assets.

The need to manage knowledge cannot be denied, but not many have acted upon that need. Wherever knowledge management is being implemented, it may stretch from technology-oriented methods of gaining access to, managing and delivering information, to substantial efforts at changing the organizational culture.

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Double Entry Bookkeeping

April 28, 2008 at 2:03 am · Filed under software

Double-entry Bookkeeping is one of the standard accounting practices for recording financial transactions. Five hundred years ago it was codified for the first time by Luca Pacioli.

The conceptual framework is that a business can be described by a number of different accounts, each describing an aspect of the business in monetary terms. Every transaction in double-entry Bookkeeping has a dual effect; for example, buying machinery means losing cash but gaining the monetary value of the machinery.

Double-entry Bookkeeping works on the principle that assets are the summation of liabilities and equity. For the accounts to remain in balance, a change in one account must be matched with a change in another account. These changes are known as debits and credits. Debit and credit are interrelated; when an account is debited another account in relation is credited. Assets and accounts receivable are treated as debits, while liabilities and accounts payable are treated as credits.

The use of debit or credit to increase or decrease an account depends on the normal balance of the account. To close the books of accounts, the accountant will adjust expenses and revenues by appropriately crediting and debiting the income summary. Credit and debit items are summarized at the end of a recording period in a trial balance. A trial balance is a list of all the debits and credits. The debits and credits must be matched in the trial balance. The trial balance is used as the basis for the preparation of the balance sheet and a profit and loss account, and also used for error-checking mechanisms.

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