One of the business plan basic objective is to prove to financiers that the company will be adequately supervised when trade relations will be settle. Periodical reports may be written in order to help both company directors and third parties: auditor, banks, tax inspectors, etc. Small enterprises think sometimes that accounting and reports are just a formality and a waste of time and that they are only a common practice. But this is not true. Management controls are aimed to manage a company in the same way the car's dashboard are essential to drive it.
Company directors decide which are the key indicators needed to have success in all important aspects. In order to have an overview of the company state in any moment, we may develop a periodical system able to collect very interesting information, to analyze it and to come to conclusion in an easy way. So, given that startup companies have higher risks, control processes may be more sophisticated than medium enterprises. Planned procedures may be detailed enough to give useful information, but they may also be easy to follow in order to get appropriate results. It is also important that changes can be done in the procedures, if needed. It goes without saying that the detailed analysis is useful only if we have it before the problem becomes serious.
The three aspects that may be supervised are:
In the field of financial control, we may decide if the activity has enough unity to have an accountant in the personnel. This would be a perfect solution for a company that expect to get a noticeable growth in the short term. However, resources are normally insufficient when starting up and the best solution is to contract a company to take charge of accounting during a period of time (it must be able to write a report requested in a periodic time).
Some workers could be charged with the duty of different control tasks. In the case of sellers, for example, they could collect and process sales information (to elaborate registries to control kinds of products, customers, sales representative, for each visit and call). We may also elaborate files in order to survey sales made, sales visits, calls and aspect debated with customers. Moreover, we should create registers for each activity we consider to.
Production information may be also recorded in order to analyze costs, effectiveness, speed and production quality (per hour/ per workers in services companies), time needed to produce the different components, waste percentage, production rate of every machine, material expenses, energy consumption, etc. They may be analyzed in the production department; however, all the registries may be at the disposal of all the company workers (accountant, commercial manager,...). Like this the information could be analyzed together with the company's total costs and decisions could be made in the different departments.
Control list- What is the accounting system chosen?
- What kind of information control is obtained? How often?
- Who is in charge of the accounting?
- Who are the auditors?
- Which are the most important activity controls (production, personnel, quality and environment)?
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