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It’s never a question of if your firm has vulnerabilities, but what they are and how to solve them. Just like any ship floating the ocean, sometimes leaks or other safety concerns can crop up. Sure, modernized and optimized ships and businesses both have renewed methods of overcoming the tumult of the ocean or market waves, but they will still need to reinforce these developments over time in order to remain as strong as once intended. Accounting for the vulnerabilities of your firm can sometimes be a tough job, especially if you’re not sure where they are. We all have blind spots, and so in these circumstances it might be best to call in help.

Luckily, you’re in the right place for that. With the following advice, accounting for the vulnerabilities of your firm should be clearer than you might have expected, and could potentially clue you in to various methods used by the strongest businesses of today. We hope that this guide is both comprehensive and targeted, and can help you in numerous ways.

Accounting

Accounting is essential to get right. Even small miscalculations or fluctuations in your financial planning can have a long-term knock on effect that you should really rather desire to avoid. Of course, modern calculative methods and the time-honoured method of double-checking any and all work provided is essential for the fair progression of your business. But there are often other methods you can employ in order to automate your financial planning while still retaining the human touch. For example, outsourcing an excellent accounting firm to work with your business in the early days can do more than you realize for their impartial manner of looking at your books.

Of course, as you move a team in-house for that strategy, you can give the accountants more clearance over your predictive patterns, allowing them to factor in advice and to lend the perspective of expected trends to forecasted costs and a range of other excellent guidance. Ensuring that both of these elements are watertight can prevent the vulnerabilities of your firm from showing in the first instance.

But it can also be essential to give your in-house accountants the tools to develop their best work, or perhaps, if running a smaller business, unlock the tools for yourself. It’s not uncommon for those helming a business with the technical skills in that proficiency find themselves struggling to keep on top of the books, mostly because it’s not what they are familiar with. Excellent accounting software, such as that offered by MTD for VAT, can offer a range of excellent functionalities to make this hair-pulling requirement much easier and even enjoyable to deal with every week.

Office Functionalities

Many firms can find themselves struggling from time to time. Perhaps staff productivity has lowered, and no one understands why. The staff are hardly simply giving up on their jobs. The vision is still going strong, and no one has voiced any complaints as to the workload they are dealing with. No, in fact, company culture seems to be going strong, but for some reason, the staff just aren’t as active as they used to be.

It’s easy for a boss to consider mass layoffs, or perhaps slow replacement, or other investments such as team-building activities whenever something like this draws its head. But sometimes, that’s not needed, and actually quite surplus to requirements. It might be that the simple office functionalities aren’t being taken care of. Think of an office that isn’t clean as soon as the employees walk in. The employees might enter their place of work with enthusiasm in the morning, but this is quickly killed when they see trash on the ground. This must never be allowed to happen.

Sometimes, the culprit can be even more simple. Perhaps the broken staff kettles in the kitchen have ensured coffees in the morning are no longer completely reliable, and instead the staff have to wait in a long-form morning commute line at Starbucks or another coffee place to get their morning fix of energy. This might sound like a small, minor, insignificant experience, but it can be enough to slightly shift the morning mindset of one of your most trusted employees.

And a small shift is all it takes. This means that ensuring your office functionalities and capabilities are continually maintained and taken care of. You never know just how much they might subconsciously affect your staff. Even one toilet cubicle out-of-order can mean heightened restroom waiting times, which means valuable minutes lost that could have been spent at the desk. If you think in this way, supporting and not limiting your employees, there’s a chance you’ll optimize the workforce in a hidden, unseen manner.

Comprehensive Safety

Comprehensive safety is also essential to build from the offset. The quickest manner of letting staff lose their essential morale is to suggest that their health isn’t being taken with the utmost priority. Some safety measures are long-lasting, maintained implements. For example, ensuring that all fire doors are in great condition and semi-seal after being closed. Others might be more in-the-moment, such as implementing a number of air filters and worthwhile ventilation when a construction job is taking place across the road.

Ensure you hire a dedicated safety officer for your business, or if in a small firm, give your business the once-over each morning, and regularly refresh your understanding regarding your safety responsibilities to yourself, your staff and clients. Investing in removing a trip hazard for good could potentially avoid you a massive payout later, for example, but aside from money, the human factor is better accounted for with this attitude.

Cloud Security

Cloud security truly matters, and it’s important to know why. Staff are no longer chained to their desks. They might travel, they might work on the go, or they might even bring work with them in their most intimate free time. Of course, the policy that denotes this as a responsibility might be flawed and worth looking at in another article, but for now let’s imagine it’s going ahead, because in most firms, it unfortunately does.

If your employee is accessing their work module on a range of devices, you open yourself up to vulnerability. Of course, certain modules will be relatively limited in the end-experience depending on permissions granted, so there’s a chance that even a corrupted account may not do much damage to your overall online infrastructure. But that’s likely asking for too much in terms of the lenience of fate. If a digital trespasser is interested in exploiting the tenuous online connection your remote employee might be using, they will likely have methods to do some real damage, even if IP theft is at the lower end of that spectrum. It sounds outlandish, but it is a common occurrence in our digital world.

This means using a solid cloud security suite is essential. Ensure your employees use your VPN registration as a default before logging onto your module, and gate access for those who are trying to log on without one. Regularly have employees change their passwords, and only give heightened permissions access to staff who truly need it. Ensure that accountability is also a key feature of this security maintenance, because if you can plug the holes quickly, you can prevent them from sinking your ship.

Staff Satisfaction

Staff satisfaction is essential to keep high at all times. Not only must you offer them an attractive package for working at your firm and the potential of training and getting better, but you must also ensure that your business has an eye on its future, and wishes to take its staff along for the ride. A business that believes in what it does will often translate that feeling down the totem pole to even the most green of trainee recruits.

This goes deeper than the office functionalities discussed above. Staff satisfaction will help you become a name with a solid reputation, because employees from the same industry talk to one another. This not only prevents a brain drain from happening, which can be lethal in specialized fields, but also ensures that others wish to come and work for you. This can help a business more than you might realise, and give you the tools to overcome a range of challenges that might have been holding you back thus far.

Invest in your training plans, schedule recruitment drives for universities and colleges, and ensure that your people-care departments such as HR and payroll are expertely staffed and continually reliable in every measure. If people are by and large the most trustworthy implement of your business yet also sometimes the most unpredictable depending on the person, it’s up to you to generate the systems that will keep them near and dear to your firm’s life. This is how a business can measure its success over the years.

With these tips, accounting for the vulnerabilities of your firm is certain to be a worthwhile venture.