Tag: business management

When is a company free from employee risk? If you answered anything other than “never,” then you need to think again. Employees present a challenge from the second they begin their careers with your company, and this challenge stays with them until they leave. As an employer, you must do everything within your power to ensure that everyone is treated equally and with respect. Smart employers know that deviating from this philosophy leads to potentially crushing legal action, and they take special care to avoid this road. The following outlines some of the areas in which unfair employee practices can lead to troubling situations.

HR: The Beginning

Right from the start, you need to ensure that your hiring process applies equally to everyone, regardless of age, race, gender or other classifications. Anyone who applies to your company should meet a streamlined, tier-based process that takes a blind eye to discriminating factors. By using a standardized process, you ensure that someone gets eliminated based on merit rather than potentially litigious factors.

Salary

Once you hire, make sure that your salary offering meets competitive rates while staying fair across the board. If you must offer more compensation for hiring someone from an opposing business to entice them to your company, then offer it as a bonus sign-on incentive based on experience rather than other unfair qualifications.

Training & Learning the Ropes

When acclimating to a new work environment, people may feel isolated as a new person. This could lead to potentially threatening behavior and reports. Eliminate this risk by ensuring that employees are treated fairly throughout the entire onboarding and training processes. As with the hiring process, streamline your training and onboarding by providing detailed handbooks at the outset and asking new hires to learn the ropes during off-times. This will allow them to receive paid training without the stress of adjusting to a new social order simultaneously. Ensure that each new hire receives a checklist of tasks and that the supervisor discusses the policies in detail, which will allow a new employee to ask questions in confidence. The same holds true for training. You should always conduct a regulated training process to ensure that every employee who works in the same position receives the same training. This will lead to better productivity and improved morale.

Evaluations

In order to eliminate charges of unjust promotions or raises, you should have a system in place to gauge employee work performance. This system should be designed in an unbiased way and should match the goals of your organization. That way, when you evaluate your employees, everyone receives a rating based on objective measures rather than subjective feelings.

Discipline

Because you will have a standard system for employee evaluations, discipline will not be cause for legal action. Employees may try to argue that a supervisor is singling them out, but if you have a set standard for counseling, then you have nothing to fear. Bias plays no part in a formalized discipline system. Make sure to involve several managers in the process, as claims of bias are weakened when the proof comes from different, objective sources.

Black and White

What’s the point of having a printed handbook if no one will adhere to its rules? Your business should run on the principle that what’s printed applies universally to everyone, even in tough situations or rare occurrences. For this reason, if your HR staff allows special circumstances to slip through the cracks or fails to uphold the handbook to the letter, then you need to have a serious discussion with them. You cannot be impartial and allow some to get away with things while others follow the rules. Your handbook should be considered the final word on every situation.

Benefits of HRIS & PEO

A human resource information system (HRIS) or professional employer organization (PEO) can further help you to eliminate employee risk in extreme or especially threatening situations. Sometimes, despite standardized procedures, employees make outlandish claims that could cost a company serious trouble. An HR person might know what to do but be momentarily distracted by the severity of the claim. In these cases, having an HRIS or PEO can alleviate some of the burden and allow the HR department to perform its job efficiently and effectively.

About the Author: Rebecca Whiteside. Read more on The Human Resources Blog.

Business forecasting is a dynamic part of your business strategy that are done to anticipate the future development of the organization and predict the trends and sales patterns. There are a variety of business forecasting software tools to forecast sales, social network traffic, production etc. Business forecasting is very important for every business in today’s world to analyze the success or failure of a business. Here in this article we will help with 7 useful hints for accurate business forecasting .

Every business owner should be aware that business forecasting alone cannot guarantee success for your business, but it guides you in the right direction and with your own efforts you have to be prepared for success or failure. One of the main advantages of business forecasting is that it allows to make proper decisions and enables the management to alter the business operation at the right time to make profits. Let us now see the 7 tips for business forecasting.

Tips #1 Know your baseline

Before doing business forecasting for your business in the future, you have to take analyze the current situation. Then you have to record the information like variable expenses, gross margin, interest rates, fixed expenses and operating profit margin. These records of information will help you determine whether your forecasting is realistic or not. Let us consider for example, if your margin jumps up significantly, then you may need to reconsider the assumptions made by you are reasonable or not.

Tips # 2 Analyze Multiple Scenarios

After you’re done with your baselines, you need be ready to calculate your forecast. In this process, you need to determine how much you expect sell and how it will cost you in the given year. In this step you have to keep track of scenarios like staffing levels, advertising, price points and marketing.

Tips # 3 Develop a flexible process

Most of the business organizations make mistakes by just looking at the sales history. So, it’s very important to develop a flexible process as it impossible to perform a single test to track the sales system, product delivery and customer history etc.

Tips # 4 Don’t involve to be too complicated

In business forecasting, you should not involve in a complicated process. Since business forecasting involves a lot of mathematical calculations.

Tips # 5 Use business forecasting softwares

To simplify your business forecasting process you can make use of business marketing softwares available in the market. Since business forecasting software can quickly and easily run the various forecasting models for you.

Tips # 6 Time series Analysis

In time series analysis of business forecasting, to judge the future operation you have to take the historical data and put it into a statistical generator. Since if there is any disruption in the supply chain, it could reduce the sales.

Tips # 7 Budget

Whenever the company begins to slow down, you need to adjust the budget with new data. This adjustment can helpful for your future operations.

The above business forecasting tips will help you determine the future growth of your business and help you to make a good profit.

About the Author: Freddy is a passionate business blogger and works as a provider of cashflow forecast software. 

Tracking your business’ expenses is an important part of keeping your financial goals on track. For this reason, it becomes important to hire a team of professionals that can help you and your business stay strongly footed for a successful financial future. Quickly it will become apparent that part of your financial success team will need to be an accountant. There are many great options you will have including those in your local community as well as offshore options. Offshore accounting options are a great way and option to keep costs low. The following explains what you will want to consider, however, before answering the question of whether or not outsourcing your accounting to an offshore company is a good idea or not.

Accessibility

One of the most important items that you will want to consider when outsourcing is whether or not you will have sufficient access to the offshore company. This is one of the biggest downfalls of using any company that is not locally, regionally, or even internally, connected with a company. An offshore accountant may not be available on a consistent basis. They may have many clients and could find that they are not going to be able to deal with the mass amount of work that comes in in an equally divided way. For that reason, it becomes important that you choose a company that will work for you as and when you need them to. This can help you to make sure that you get the most from your experience and ensure your work is completed on time.  Those with lots of accounts will be better off sticking to local based companies.

Cost

One of the greatest advantages of outsourcing your accounting to an offshore company is the cost. You do not want to spend too much on accounting and yet, want the work to be done efficiently. An offshore company can be a great way to achieve this desire as a low cost option for your business. Again, though, be sure to evaluate quality over singularly looking at price. Just because it is cheaper does not mean it will meet the same quality of service that you require. It does not necessarily mean you will not either. For that reason, weigh the cost and the service quality promised against each other and make the best decision for your business.

Trust

If you are going to choose an offshore company, one way to assess whether or not they will be able to work well with you is to really focus on the reputation and recommendations from past and current customers. Reputation for success and trust is important when you are trying to get a good service from a company, no matter what service or product they offer. Be sure that you look into the reputation of the business as this can help you to better understand whether or not outsourcing to them would be a good idea. This is an important step in any assessment of an accountant or accounting company, no matter whether they are local or offshore. Choose and plan wisely.

About the Author: Laura writes for www.liptrottandwoosey.com, a highly reputable accounting firm based in Manchester.