How to Transfer Accounting Duties

Accounting duties include the recording and reporting of a company's business transactions. Large organizations will often have several individuals responsible for this activity. Growth and contraction in a company can change the tasks each accountant will complete. Publicly held companies may need to transfer accounting duties to comply with rules or regulations from government entities. Owners and managers will oversee this process to ensure that work flow remains unrestricted and each employee is able to perform duties in an acceptable manner.

• 1

  Write job descriptions for each accounting position. Owners and managers can define the tasks or activities for each position to create a structured environment.

• 2

  Assess the productivity output of each employee. For example, accounting clerks working in the payables or receivables department must process a specific number of bills in a day or week.

• 3

  Review the segregation of duties. This concept requires companies to limit the number of tasks of one particular function, such as cash management.

• 4

  Discuss changes with employees. To avoid confusion, owners and managers should meet with employees and give them their new list of accounting duties.

• 5

  Train employees one at one time. Rather than making a wholesale shift of job responsibilities, an accounting manager should work with one or two workers at a time to train them on new tasks.

• 6

  Audit completed work to ensure accuracy. Once new responsibilities are in place, supervisors or managers should review the work to ensure it has the same quality as before.

• 7

  Implement internal controls for employees to follow. Internal controls help limit or prevent inappropriate behavior in an accounting department. The transfer of duties among workers allows for companies to create new controls to manage employees.