The
services that g o
cpa
provides can be broken down into five broad areas, click on each
heading for more information.
For more information, comments
and suggestions: 
Chilli
Creek on the Dampier Peninsula. A large number of the
Communities
on the peninsula offer outstanding holiday destinations, activities,
special tours and some just exceptional peace and quiet.
Contact the following for more information:
Broome Tourist Bureau
Kujurta
Buru
Governance
systems development and improvement
New and old
corporations need governance systems to keep themselves on track.
"Corporate Governance is the
system by which
companies are directed and controlled…”
Cadbury Report (UK),
1992
Governance matters in all
organisations, large and small. It
impacts on the owners or members and the way they direct the priorities
of the corporation and the allocation of resources. It
impacts on
the staff and customers / recipients of the services, it is important
to the ATO, corporate registrar and funding bodies.
Over time
all things change - it is an inevitable part of life. If you
don't keep an eye on your governance systems, or if you don't have them
at all - you run an increased risk of something bad happening.
It
might be the wrong priorities being followed, resources going into the
wrong area, tax office rules being breached, fraud or theft.
Enron
and HIH are well-known examples of large organisations that lost the
plot - and caused a great deal of pain in the process. Around
us
in the Kimberley there are examples every day of organisations that
lose the plot, let the owners down, let customers down, waste money and
waste people's time. You know the type: unresponsive
organisations, projects that are never completed, or maybe not even
started, constantly late reports or no reports, fines from the tax
office for late reports, confusing salary packages or budgets, lack of
written contracts, constant breaches from funders, complaints from
customers, people choosing to deal with someone else.
There
are many elements to governance, you don't have to tackle them all at
once - a big part of governance is culture and this is an important one
to get right. Here's a great little document
that will help you think about governance in your organisation.
Keeping
the governance systems up to date and active helps prevent this.
A number of leading organisations in the Kimberley
demonstrate
year in year out the benefit of maintaining effective governance
systems by achieving outstanding outcomes again and again.
Elements
of governance systems: Committee tool kits, performance reviews for
staff, risk management, budget reports and detailed enquiry, on-time
external reporting,
on-demand internal reporting. Committee training, management
review, staff mentoring and coaching, system review, process
re-engineering.
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Change management and process re-engineering
Everything
around us changes all the time, the weather, the tides, the price of a
loaf of bread. Organisations need to change just to keep pace, or
to deliver new products or services, or to adapt to competition or the
loss of key staff. The key issue is to get to undertake the
change in a positive way for the organisation, its owners and staff -
poorly managed it can be a disaster. g o cpa brings key
skills and tools to your organisation to inspire and facilitate change
and improvement.
Changing
administration and accounting systems is hard. With
some elements of a business you can pause, introduce new systems and
start up. That just doesn't work with administration and
accounting, they have to keep working all the time through the change
process. When you try and
change something like an accounting system or process you have to
make sure you have the capacity and capability to keep functioning.
Critically you need to know what you're doing now and what
you
want to do in the future.
Two
key elements of administration and accounting should be resilience and
robustness. It is these two elements that will stand an
organisation in good stead allowing it to weather storms and adapt to
change. However events sometimes overwhelm systems and, if not
addressed, can lead to bad habits. Staff change and knowledge
is
lost or not understood, customer or funder demands lead to a knee-jerk
change to procedures without thinking through the consequences, control
issues lead to multiple handovers slowing processing to a crawl.
One small setback after another undermines good
culture in an
organisation and bad habits become ingrained.
Defining the reports
you want from
finance systems, the timing of key events, controls and authorities,
all
need to be clearly set out before starting to change, thereby
minimising
handovers - aiming for one-touch processing will create efficiency and
effectiveness.
Elements of change
management: process mapping
and re-engineering, organisation review, staff performance management, key performance
indicators, reporting cycles and targets, job descriptions, workflow
arrangements, appropriate technology implementation.
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Financial
reporting, BAS and budgets
Finance
systems are not ends in themselves, they are tools for business.
A budget is not just something for the book-keeper to worry
about: it
is an essential tool of delegation and accountability between the
directors or committee members and project staff. Finance
systems
are only as useful as the information they are able to provide to
project staff, managers and directors.
Finance systems can
help
bind organisations together and help the whole organisation to achieve
its goals. To do this they must have clear reporting - not
reams
and reams of detail but clear, concise, timely reports in agreed
formats that indicate whether things are on track or not.
They
must be tailored to the needs of the users: project staff and boards of
directors should not receive the same reports, they have different
priorities and different levels of detail. Routine reports
are
not an end in themselves, they are a starting point indicating where
attention is needed - above all they should be linked to performance
reports so that it is clear what impact resources are having on meeting
the objectives.
Today's book-keeping
and accounting systems can
deliver these reports directly, so long as they are set up properly.
If your finance team can't generate project reports and
monthly
board reports directly from the system, something is wrong.
Days
spent fiddling with spreadsheets to produce routine reports indicates
major problems. Annual reporting will add strain to any
organisation but a systematic and timely approach will ensure reports
are generated in a timely fashion and ensure auditors are able to focus
on
key issues rather than irritating errors.
Ensuring statutory
requirements are met when defining the needs of the system will ensure
time isn't wasted. BAS and other statutory reports should be
generated
automatically from within the financial system and can be used to
provide a alternate view on the entity and be used as a measure of
performance.
Elements of
financial reporting: defining reporting
requirements, defining accounting system needs, implementing budget
systems, engaging project staff in report design, developing the
virtuous cycle of corporate reporting, statutory compliance
review, balance sheet review and cleanup, identifying key indicators
for directors and boards.
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Finance
training and support
Even
the best book-keepers and accountants can become isolated, lose track
of
systems development, wonder how to deal with an unusual transaction,
become absorbed in other elements of the corporation, forget to
generate reports in a timely manner or find it difficult to deal with
suspicion of fraudulent activity.
New staff and
directors come to the organisation and may need orientation or a
tailored training or induction programme.
Formal
training courses and events are important ways to develop staff, either
one-on-one, or as small group training combined with ongoing support
that targets a
different way of developing skills within an organisation. It
is
a particularly effective way of demonstrating a committment to staff
development and in advancing skills and seniority of individuals.
Elements
of training and support: process and system identification, hands-on
training, one-on-one or many-to-one, development of step-guides for key
transactions, routine attendance on site as well as on-demand telephone
and internet support.
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Business
advice, risk management and interim management solutions
Staff
leave, ideas change, circumstances become less clear, choices have to
be made. Getting an informed independent view of your
circumstances can help resolve issues that may be poorly defined or
that have simply been ignored. Developing new ways of doing
business, creating links with other organisations and establishing
new benchmarks for performance can deliver step-change improvement for
all types of organisations.
The best way of
delivering this
varies, some organisations take advantage of staff vacancies to appoint
an interim officer who can help carry the load and bring in new ideas
at the same time. Reviews and coaching are other ways of
introducing change and establishing new levels of efficiency and
effectivenss.
Risk
management is a popular tool of large organisations as it is a very
structured way of analysing the operations of an organisation and
identifying how different activities can be effectively managed, the
resources needed and the risk of failure. Periodically
undertaken
as a method of reviewing an operational plan it can be used to develop
good understanding of the project challenges and identify key
performance indicators.
Elements of business
advice: strategic and
operational plan review, risk assessments and risk appetites,
benchmarking projects, interim staff
positions, non-executive director engagement, senior management
coaching.
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