Make Day 1 of onboarding impressive all around

It takes a lot of time and energy to make the right hire. But the work isn’t done once a job offer is accepted. To make a new employee feel welcome, confident in their decision to join the team, and impress them on their first day, you have to nail the onboarding process.

We recently helped one former client with both the hiring and onboarding of a new employee.  They had hired a Controller, but it was not working out. Thankfully, for our former client the new hire was self-aware enough to resign before the situation got bad, and made sure nothing fell through the cracks while his replacement was found.

That’s where we came in.

Six weeks later, and after the first day of onboarding, we are extremely proud of how we assisted our client in getting the right hire and nailing the onboarding process the second time around.

With most small- to mid-sized businesses, the accounting team is generally less than one to three people, which doesn’t leave a lot of manpower to create an onboarding process.  And small companies often lack the skillset to know how to develop the onboarding process for an accounting hire.  We were there to help.

Below are the four key documents we created with our client that made their new Controller’s first day organized and provided an effective, high-level view of his new job. The new Controller was impressed by how smoothly the first day went, and so were we.  

1. Accounting Operations at XYZ Company. This pinwheel of duties helped lay out all the components in the accounting cycle that make up the big picture.

2. Accounting Calendar. In one snapshot, this document described the different tasks performed on daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual basis.

3. Process Flow. Depending on the specialization of your business and those processes, this one-page document (created using smart art in Excel) gives your new hire a quick high-level view of the various steps involved in those major processes.

4. How to Accounting Manual. This guide lists all the accounting steps performed, in detail, across all the various systems.  This is critical for companies that have very specialized processes for their accounting operations – not as critical for companies that have plain vanilla payroll, accounts payable, and accounts receivable. 

These are helpful documents for any organization to create and maintain. They are also effective tools to share with the owners so that they have an idea what it takes to manage the accounting and/or back office functions. Are your documents ready? What would you add to the list? Let me know at info@quincycfo.com.