We began formally tracking metrics in our Accounting teams this past year and provide our CFO a monthly report on how we're doing including commentary on highlights and issues and how we're addressing them. We're a relatively young company and are always looking for ways to improve our current processes. By tracking certain areas, we definitely shed light on some areas that needed attention and crafted our annual goals around these areas so we've found this to be a very valuable process. We're also exploring how to best communicate some of the issues to other teams (e.g. invoice revisions due to errors from sales or operations teams). We look at the following:
Accounting:
Time to close the books
Time to issue management reports
Prior period adjustments
One-off items
How DSO and DPO are trending against each other
Personnel costs of AR and AP as % of net revenue (since these teams are part of the sales cycle)
Receivables:
DSO
% balance over 90 days (by AR person and sales region)
# of invoices + credit memos processed
# of revised invoices processed by reason
% of invoices produced and sent on time (by person)
Payables:
% of balance over 90 days
% of unbilled payables
% of unapplied payables
# of manual adjustments applied
# of tickets received and closed (vendor inquiries)
Select a few that you find would be meaningful to your teams and company and then add to or revise them once you have a feeling for what the data is telling you and what areas you need to explore further. Good luck!
-Carrie
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Member's Profile
Debra Johnson
(A/P Manager at Verizon) | Oct 23, 2013
I have tracked the first three on the Payables list. It was necessary to track A/P aging and unbilled payables as it identified how we did in resolving vendor invoices and requesting vendor credit/rebills.
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Member's Profile
Steve Peterson
(VP Marketing and Channel at CellarStone Inc.) | Mar 4, 2013
How about the following in addition to above to measure efficiency:
* Budgeted time on projects vs actual
* Dollars saved from employee suggestions
* Accounting system downtime (during normal biz hours)
* Billing accuracy
* Managers time accessing general ledger
* Manual transactions vs automated transactions
* Number of customer calls in a test week (3rd week of each month)