| DALLAS, Jan. 29, 2009 – Your company doesn’t have to settle for plain-vanilla results when outsourcing general ledger (GL) functions.
“Achieving GL excellence is no small challenge, but it’s attainable,” said Ben Trowbridge, CEO of Alsbridge, Inc., the leading outsourcing consultancy.
View the Alsbridge article, “Leveraging Your Outsourcing Advantage in General Ledger Processing,”
Trowbridge recommends four low-cost, low-pain techniques for ensuring processing success, maintaining good relationships with your provider and achieving excellence in GL outsourcing:
Work plan each month, every month. Pre-close, close and post-close take two weeks in a well-run outsourcing GL shop. Most GL shops use the other two weeks to fix prior-month entries and gear up for the new monthly close. Instead, take four hours after every monthly close to pre-plan the new month with your provider. Allocate time with a daily plan mapped to each deliverable or objective.
Improve one item every month. Some typical candidates: - Create automatic data feeds for select balance sheet reconciliations, minimizing manual data entry
- Automate 10 manual journal entries every month
- Design and measure one new “thing” each month that impacts service
- Reconcile the fixed asset ledger to identify write-off candidates
- Design a process for one unused enterprise resource planning (ERP) screen
- Update approval and routing tables
- Identify/eliminate three bottlenecks in the close process
Insist that the provider learn your customers’ business. Quarterly, be sure the provider either spends a week in person with clients or makes calls at a customer’s location, learning their business and building trust. The provider will learn to appreciate the business and will build allies.
Review your service level agreements twice a year. Compare service levels against historical performance, and work with the provider to set new standards and expectations. Resetting service levels must be built into the outsourcing contract. This will improve performance, build trust and ensure that you stay on the leading edge in the marketplace, Trowbridge said.
For more information on outsourcing advisory services, contact Alsbridge at 214-696-6410 or visit www.Alsbridge.com. For more original research and insight on outsourcing topics, visit www.OutsourcingLeadership.com.
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About Alsbridge
Alsbridge, Inc. is an award-winning global advisory firm, providing unparalleled expertise in information, technology and business process outsourcing, shared services, finance and accounting, and benchmarking. The firm is fact-based and client-focused, with a proven methodology that fosters success. Alsbridge defines client goals and scope, finds the best cultural fit with providers, refines the best solutions and eases transitions and implementation. Founded in 2005, Alsbridge is the proven, effective difference. For more information, visit www.Alsbridge.com. |
