Financial policies are the rules or principles of your business’s accounting and financial practices. They should reflect your business’s values and culture.
Your procedures are the instructions that outline what your employees must do to abide by these policies.
Depending on your business, you might have financial policies and procedures about things like how to handle petty cash, debt collection or payments from clients and customers.
It might seem daunting but creating financial policies and procedures manual can have many long-term benefits for your business.
For example, your manual will:
Policies provide an overview of certain rules that you have in your business. They should:
Sometimes a policy will need a supporting procedure.
Procedures are clear and concise instructions on how to abide by the policy. They detail the sequence of activities needed to complete tasks.
Your procedures should:
The policies and procedures that you’ll need will depend on your business. Think about important areas of your business where having consistent rules and processes would add value.
For example:
Use our financial policy and procedure manual template as a starting point.
If creating a full manual feels overwhelming, try to complete it in real-time as you work. Writing while doing helps to break it into manageable chunks and ensure you capture every step:
For example, if you have a new customer, write up how you’ll record the details, where these will be kept, how you’ll set a customer credit limit and any other standards you want to set.