5 Ways to Get Your Team Excited About Accounting

According to a survey by TD Bank, 46% of small business owners say that bookkeeping is their least favorite task.

Despite a general dislike for accounting, most owners understand how important it is for their business. It helps them manage finances, capture expenses, track profitability, monitor cash flow, and assess solvency, to name but a few benefits.

The problem is that your employees may not see it that way. They may view accounting as just another task. For them, the numbers might seem arbitrary. Salespeople only care about sales. The technical department only cares about technical issues. Customer support only cares about customer needs. And so it goes.

How do you change this perception? How do you get people to look at the numbers and engage in accounting?

The key is to get your team to see how their work makes a difference in your business. How it contributes to business results and improves the bottom line.

Do that, and they’ll feel more engaged and motivated. They’ll align their work with business results and take ownership of the results they’re trying to improve.

Seems simple enough. But what strategies can you implement right now to get them excited? Here are five.

1. Communicate the “Why” Behind Accounting Procedures

It’s likely that you have specific procedures for invoicing, expense tracking, time tracking, and even billing. You may record transactions manually or use software. Or, perhaps you choose to only record transactions when cash changes hands as opposed to the accrual method.

Regardless, you know why you follow those procedures, and why you don’t take shortcuts. But employees may not understand.

They may feel like the procedures are unnecessarily long, and seek shortcuts or make that paperwork the lowest priority task on their list, wholly apart from their “real work.”

You can create a connection between accounting and paperwork, and their work by explaining the reason behind the process. For example: “The reason we want to accept online payments is because our customers appreciate convenience and it speeds up how quickly we get paid.”

If they understand, they’ll be more inclined to follow through. They may even have ideas for improvements! More importantly, if you connect that procedure to a positive result, you’ll engage them in the process.

Assume you want the sales team to complete travel expense reports once a month, for example. And you need them to provide an itemized breakdown in your accounting software before sending it to the financial manager.

Some staff may take shortcuts and ask if they can send only the total, without a detailed breakdown. Others simply won’t get around to it.

The key here is to help them understand that completing the paperwork in a timely and accurate fashion helps everyone know exactly where the business stands. It’s also crucial to control costs that may otherwise creep in over time.

2. Make a Habit of Sharing Visibility and Insights

As a leader, it’s essential to share your business goals, priorities and performance with employees. Put simply, they should never be left to wonder: How’s our business doing?

Moreover, you should also help employees understand the link between the priorities and the work they’re doing.

For example, one of your priorities may be to improve cash flow. To get your salespeople excited about this, you could show them, with helpful illustrations, how their sales and efforts to control sales costs—such as client meetings, food costs and travel expenses—have made a difference.

By sharing such results, you’re helping employees connect the dots. They’ll better understand the importance of their work and how it contributes to a better result. You can also use accounting software that allows for shared visibility of critical financial metrics.

One way of making this easy and immediate is investing in a tool that shows performance dashboards that can be read at a glance. FreshBooks, for example, has a unique reporting dashboard that provides a summary of company profitability.

Because it’s the same software that you manage invoices and expenses from, it will always be as up-to-date as your inputs. Plus, you’ll be able to share these reports with select employees.

3. Set Clear KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measures set to determine how well a company is achieving its business goals.

To ensure employees are on the same page and working toward common goals, link these KPIs to a specific goal and share it with your employees.

For example, you could have a goal of increasing sales by X% with a KPI that sales teams need to get a certain amount of customers each month. Conversely, you might have a KPI to decrease costs that involves every individual looking for more efficient cost savings on everything from meals and entertainment to office equipment.

Every individual on your team should have their own KPIs that translate to your business goals, and recognition for significant contributions to those goals.

4. Onboard Business Accounting Software That Simplifies Accounting

Part of the reason why people flinch at the term accounting is because they think it requires manual input, and many of the tasks involved are repetitive and mundane. Picture creating a new invoice for a client each month, even though the client is on a retainer and the invoice details remain the same.

Or, recording expenses and income in spreadsheets and then creating reports from that. Not very exciting, right? Thankfully, today you can invest in software that leverages the cloud to automate many of these tasks.

You can set up recurring invoices for clients who are on retainers. You can connect to your bank account for automatic income and expense classifications.

The software even gives you an at-a-glance overview of how your business is performing with profitability reports. All this, in a way that non-accountants can understand!

Of course, not all software is created equal. There is software that requires you to jump through many hoops, and you may even need training. The problem is that training involves a learning curve, which can discourage people from getting started.

FreshBooks is built to be ridiculously easy—so easy that you don’t need any accounting knowledge to use it. What better tool to give your team to get them engaged with managing and tracking finances and business performance?!

5. Fire Up Your Team With Incentives

If you have a salesperson or team, this section is for you. I remember working for a company as a business development manager. I was responsible for a growing company and understood the significance of the numbers, but I was never excited about them.

That was until the company introduced a commission structure. Numbers were now my currency. I paid close attention to them. It was in my interest. After all, the more sales I made for the company, the more money I made for myself.

You can apply the same principles to your entire team, whether they’re in sales, finance, customer support or project management. The key is to reward employees for performance, so they sustain that performance. For example, you could give them a bonus for achieving their KPIs.

Conclusion

Accounting is crucial for assessing business performance. You understand that, but your team doesn’t necessarily.

In fact, getting your team engaged and excited about accounting may feel difficult. But it doesn’t have to be if you use the right strategies:

• Make them understand the reasons behind your accounting procedures
• Make it a habit of sharing visibility and insights so that they can see the link between work and results
• Set clear KPIs attached to business results
• Use business accounting software that simplifies accounting
• Connect rewards to results through a commission structure

What strategies do you use to get your team excited about accounting?