It’s been at least three decades — probably more — since everyone began talking about the coming of the “paperless” office.  Personal computers arrived about 30 years ago, which were soon followed by networking, the public Internet, and wireless computing. Yet we are still not paperless.  In fact, now that we have inexpensive laser printers and digital copiers, we have more paper than ever in the office.  Why?  Whatever happened to the promise of the paperless office?

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Are great quarterbacks born as great football players or did they have to learn how to play football?  Great players practice all week for the game on Sunday.  But what do they practice?  They are already great.  They practices plays — football procedures.

In business, employees are expected to perform their job all day long.  But how much time is allocated to practicing their job?

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The financial transactions of any accounting system can be grouped into four major accounting cycles: Revenue, Purchase, Payroll, and General Journal.

Four Main Accounting Cycles

Accounting transactions in the form of sales invoices, receipts, purchase invoices, checks, and payroll entries are posted to the appropriate journals. Simultaneously — as a form of internal control — these postings are recorded in the general ledger, or “GL”. The GL accumulates all transaction activity, where it is organized by account class.

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Policy management provides the foundation for your Governance, Risk management, and Compliance (GRC) program.  Business governance is about directing and controlling your organization.  Risk management is how you handle the various risks to your company — whether you eliminate, mitigate, or accept them.

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Companies are using a wide variety of intranet software solutions to develop policies and procedures for multiple departments.  Common policies and procedures software solutions include editing in MS-Word, publishing in PDF, and managing files in SharePoint.  You can try putting most of your information on a wiki, but a wiki can be an inefficient solution for keeping documentation up-to-date and under control.  Adobe has a product called RoboHelp that’s good for maintaining a single source and distributing various versions and revision changes to a mixture of channels.

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Bizmanualz is one of the leaders in policies and procedures documentation. Our policy and procedure manuals are written with small to medium businesses (SMBs) in mind. Thousands of companies that have been looking for a way to develop and implement a system of effective policies and procedures quickly have relied on us.

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If your company is like most, you’re storing your policies and procedures on a file server. Perhaps your working drafts are in one folder, approved versions are in another folder, and previous versions are archived in yet another folder. Some companies will create folders for the different clauses of ISO 9001 or arrange documents according to functional areas or departments. A lot of these companies aren’t even practicing the most basic security techniques, like limiting “read-write” privileges to a select few.

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Policies and procedures need to be managed, not simply collected, as we oftentimes tend to do.  Add in the offspring of policies and procedures — records — and you have the making of a problem common to business…a lack of control.

Control of records and documents is critical to compliance.  ISO 9001 requires document control, record control, and specific procedures that clarify how you are maintaining control.  HIPAA requires access control.  Sarbanes-Oxley requires access and revision control.  Document and record control are at the heart of many of the various compliance schemes businesses encounter.

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Policies are most often rooted in undesired consequences.  Something happens that shouldn’t — a door isn’t secure from the outside and someone gets in your building who doesn’t belong — and a policy (i.e., “That door is for exiting the building ONLY in case of emergencies.  It is NEVER to be used as an entry.”) is enacted.

A few — such as high-level, or corporation-wide — policies are designed to promote desirable consequences for an organization, as well as prevent undesired ones.  In this article, we’re going to stick with the first kind.  In any case, the best policies give everyone in the organization a sense of purpose and direction.  So…how do you write a good policy?

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In part one of this article, you learned the first three steps in the Bizmanualz process of making a policies and procedures manual – research, design and development, and procedure writing.  Now, as Paul Harvey liked to say, “Here’s the rest…of the story.”

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