It is all fine and well that you have embraced the
shift in managing budgets by getting input from your staff from all levels of
your organisation and it will undoubtedly ensure your budget and planning will
be far more accurate and the staff will feel more empowered by their
involvement.
However, empowerment does not change the fact that
your staff are busy with their day to day activities, ensuring the business is
on track and growing, and you may face a few problems getting them to prioritise
accessing the system and reviewing the numbers. Providing the access and
requesting the input is not going to get you very far if your team “hasn’t had
time to look at it yet” and therefore can claim ignorance of any updates or
changes.
As opposed to having to chase staff to get them to
keep an eye out for any changes on a daily or weekly basis, it is much easier
to set up pre-programmed alerts that allow you to push data directly to the
relevant people via an email. This will ensure key people are kept aware of
critical business information in a convenient format suited to their lifestyle,
at a predetermined time.
While not all systems will offer this, there are
definitely those that do, including idu-Concept, so keep your eyes and ears
open when reviewing additional modules for your financial software.
Ideally, your alerts should be able to be
controlled by the administrator or the user, depending on the needs of the
business and the individuals involved. Decision need to be made from determining
when an alert is triggered (whether the threshold is a transaction, balance or
variance that affects the user), to scheduling the timing of the notification
and the repetition of the alerts.
On one hand you don’t want the user to be able to
override or dismiss the reminders before they have acted on them, but on the
other if the user sets the parameters themselves, they are more likely to choose
what works for them and then follow through.
Whoever
makes the decision, the software should allow them to easily make some further
adaptations. From identifying socially acceptable times to receive
notifications (to avoid easy-to-miss emails’ at 3 in the morning while allowing
for different time zones for international use) to activating
the alert from a predetermined point in time (it would be pointless to notify
users that they are under budget daily from the 1st of the month
when salaries are only paid on the 25th).
Knowing your staff and understanding their
challenges and how best to provide them with what they need is as important to
empowerment as giving them the responsibilities in the first place.
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