Onboarding is Your First Impression. Make it Great!

Making the right hire for your company is never easy. Matching the background, skills, and culture of a candidate to your organization takes time and energy, and in today’s job market, the high-level employees you want are hard to find.

Its important that once you find an employee that is the perfect fit for your company, you make sure they never want to leave! And if that employee shows up on the first day and your onboarding process does nothing to make them feel welcomed or part of the team, they might just wonder why they took the job in the first place.

We find that smaller to mid-sized businesses have trouble creating a robust hiring and onboard experience, particularly for hiring an accounting team. For these smaller businesses, only one to three employees are needed in most cases, so its often hard to justify investing a large amount of resources for the task.

Quincy CFO understands this problem and is happy to assist organizations in this process. Not long ago one of our clients was bringing on a new Controller and requested help with their onboarding process. Collaborating with the client, we created a series of documents that helped prepare the employee for their first day and beyond:

A ‘Who Does What in Accounting’ Document. This document served as an overview of the duties performed by the employee, in addition to the duties of others that touch accounting tasks.

An Accounting Calendar. One simple document allowed the new hire to monitor all of their deadlines and get an idea of how work at the client’s office flowed from day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month. This could also include the full cycle of one year and highlight when their busy seasons are (budgets, insurance renewal, audits, etc).

A Process Flow Document. This particular client had a somewhat complex series of processes for certain tasks, so we helped develop this Excel sheet to offer a high-level briefing on the steps involved in various accounting processes.

Accounting Systems Overview. Finally, a one-page picture of which systems we use and draw information from to build the financial statements.  Examples being the bank website, the accounting system, the third-party expense report tool, etc.

This isn’t all there is to a strong onboarding process of course – the human resources team will have a big part in it too. But giving your new employee the tools they need to do a good job right out of the gate is a way of telling that employee that they are valued and you want to work with them to do a great job.