The pandemic forced most companies to go remote for what was originally anticipated to be a 2-4 week stint. Over two years later, many companies still have remote employees, at least to some degree.

Hybrid working has become the new normal and small business owners continue to struggle with the added challenges of how to manage remote workers. While office-based businesses have largely adapted to managing a remote workforce, other types of small businesses continue to wrestle with the increased demands of location-divided staff.
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Communication challenges, technology barriers, and access to key information remain difficult among small and mid-sized companies trying to learn how to manage remote teams virtually. If this describes your business, our guide to managing remote workers will give you the tools needed to be successful in this new era: 

One of the most common questions we hear when talking to prospective clients is “How do I know if I have the right accounting team in place?”

Now, the underlying questions wrapped in this broader question can vary to include things like:

• Are our employees’ skillsets the right fit for our most critical positions?
• Do we have enough accounting personnel?
• Where should we be using technology to augment our human capabilities?
• Are all of our accounting and finance needs being met with the roles we currently have, or are there gaps?

​If you are wrestling with these same types of questions, use this guide to determine if you have the right accounting team in place to move your company forward: 

A guest post from Jen Girard at CFO Selections

We get this request all the time. A small non-profit needs to hire a new Finance Manager. Sometimes they call this person a CFO or Controller, but whatever the title, the role is a Superhero who wears multiple costumes and does it all!

How do you find (and afford) this person? Find out how other non-profits are doing it:

​After another difficult year, savvy employers have come to realize that supporting their office staff needs to be a top priority to combat labor shortage woes as financial uncertainty continues. With 85% of employees open to new job opportunities (even if they are not actively looking), employers understand how important it is to proactively work to retain employees.
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As the year comes to an end, organizations are asking themselves, “How can I support my accounting and finance staff next year?” 

In 2011, LinkedIn hit the 100 million user mark and I received an email thanking me for being in the first .5% of members. That means I was somewhere in the 400,000 range of early users. I joined LinkedIn in 2002, back when you needed a member to “let you in.” 

Why did I start using LinkedIn? I had been in recruiting for about three years and knew the power of networking when seeking a job. Furthermore, I recognized the power of a tool where someone could see the work history of people in their professional network.

Fast forward to 2021 and now LinkedIn has more than 750 million members and is where every recruiter goes to find candidates for a position. I am no longer unique as a recruiter using LinkedIn like I was in 2002, but there are not many recruiters who have been using LinkedIn for 19 years.

I see resources all the time on how to create and manage your LinkedIn profile, and I want to chime in on a few ideas that I have observed in nearly 20 years of looking at LinkedIn user profiles. (My focus will be on the CFO position as that is where I have spent my time the last 13 years with CFO Selections, as well as among individuals seeking jobs in the United States.)

Are you paying for compliance accounting or advisory accounting? Do you know?

Compliance accounting is straightforward – it deals with day-to-day accounting, reporting, and tax preparation. But what about advisory accounting?
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The Intuit Tax Council defines accounting advisory services as, “Taking client challenges and applying strategies to create opportunities in service to their growth.” Accounting advisory interweaves technology, relationships, communication, and strategy to provide companies the fuel needed for profitable growth. 

Don't wait around for "the right time" to improve your accounting functions! Now is the time to stop putting off the planning and cleanup work that always seems to get pushed to the backburner. Commit yourself to embracing a culture of continuous improvement – looking for places where you can overhaul whatever is broken and streamline areas that are not working optimally.

So, how do you identify where your accounting department needs to improve?

Ask your accounting team and any staff that deals directly with them where their pain points are and what they would prioritize fixing. By including both the team’s feedback and the rest of the organization’s perspective, you will get more balanced input on what kinds of changes should be prioritized.
Focus on operations, processes, and policies with the potential to have a big impact on either efficiency or accuracy. Possible areas to focus on include:

A guest post from our partners at CFO Selections.

With an increased focus on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) in recent years, many companies have begun asking, “Do accountants do financial planning?”

For cash-strapped startups and small businesses the temptation to simply add to their accountant’s workload is strong. However, this is not a wise decision. While overloading any one role presents problems on its own, entrusting accountants with FP&A poses its own unique risks.

The differences between accounting and FP&A necessitate that it be handled by separate personnel with unique skillsets and performance objectives. Understanding what FP&A entails and what is at stake can help organizations make smart decisions about who should handle this critical responsibility.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ Report to the Nations reveals that on average companies lose 5% of their annual revenue to fraud with a median loss per case of $125,000 and an average loss per case of just over $1.5M.

The report further elaborates that more than half of businesses never recover any of the lost funds.

While only 20% of fraud is reportedly committed by business owners (compared to 41% by individual contributors and 35% by managers), the cost of owner-run fraud schemes cost their businesses 10 times more on average than fraud cases committed by lower-level employees.  

The average perpetrator of fraudulent crimes has been with the company for 1-5 years and engages in their fraudulent activity for 14 months before being detected. And small businesses typically carry a higher fraud risk than their larger counterparts with twice the rate of billing fraud and payroll fraud and four times the rate of check and payment tampering. 

No one wants to believe that fraud could be happening at their company, but these statistics tell the true story – fraud is far more widespread than many people think.

So, how does this kind of fraud occur and why is the risk of fraud higher this year than previous years? And most importantly, how do you identify fraud and what can you do to prevent it?