Financial Statement Analysis Austin, TX October 29, 2009 Click here

Internal Business Processes

October 2009

I am so close to getting my new website up, and if it overwhelms me with business, I may be in a bit of trouble. Yellowbook-CPE.com doesn't have its entire act together yet.  But hey, you have to start somewhere.  Yes, it would be better to have every little thing ready, but we'd be waiting years.  I am taking comfort in the well worn saying "Don't let perfection get in the way of good."

So, the balanced scorecard has been helping me come up with plans for my business and showing me all the holes in my reasoning.  The balanced scorecard works great for that because it is a holistic mode--well-thought-out, multifaceted, logical, and complete. 

The basic structure of the balanced scorecard/strategy map is as follows:

• In order to have good financial results,
• You have to have happy customers.
• And in order to have happy customers,
• You have to have smooth internal business processes.
• And in order to have smooth internal business processes,
• You have to have the people and the technology to pull the processes off.

And we have talked through the financial results and the customer part.  Now it is time to work through the internal business processes.  And as I do that, I can also identify the people and the technologies that help me pull this off. 

I see five general process areas:

1. Product development
2. Commerce
3. Testing
4. Marketing
5. Compliance

And each of these five can be subdivided into plenty of sub processes. (I am again, overwhelmed...)

How did I come up with these?  Some of it came from the geniuses at Harvard who invented the Balanced Scorecard.  They say you should consider four processes:

• Operations management processes
• Customer management processes
• Innovation processes
• Regulatory and social processes

I just sort of customized them for me.  That is allowable. 

So each of my five major categories has subcategories, and each of these has subcategories.  It just goes on and on, but the basics are:

1. Product development

• Idea generation
• Writing
• Development
• Editing for technical correctness
• Editing for logic
• Edit for readability
• Edit for grammar
• Format

2. Commerce

• Royalty share
• Contracting with authors
• Accounting
• Electronic commerce
• Sales tax submission
• Store/website updates

3. Testing

• Quiz and product upload
• Quiz software development and corrections
• CPA testers

4. Marketing

• Blog/Twitter/newsletter
• Website updates
• Advertising
• SEO

5. Compliance

• Application to NASBA
• Updates to materials
• Records retention

The next natural questions are "Who is going to do this?" and "What technology do I need to pull this off?" 

As anyone who has built a team is aware, each member of the team has their own talents--sometimes very narrow talents--and they don't want to take on other roles.  It has been quite a pain to get together a team, but I have most roles filled. And I have the technology to make it all work. 

I'll let you know how it goes.

Next month, relevant performance measures for these processes.

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Leita Hart-Fanta, CPA, CGFM
Resides in Austin, Texas and can be reached at www.happycashflow.com