I am going to pick on the accounting department. For the past couple of days, we have talked about time span related to roles in the organization. Following are typical time spans for roles inside the accounting department.

Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable roles typically have time spans around one month. As they work through their daily routine, A/P and A/R must look forward to check or billing runs with a monthly reconciliation. All during the month, these roles must look forward to things which will impact that monthly reconciliation.

Payroll may require a slightly longer time span. I usually look for a time span of three months, which coincides with quarterly payroll reporting and reconciliations. There are also annual responsibilities related to W-2 filings and reconciliations, but I often expect the payroll clerk has additional support from a full-charge bookkeeper, an outsourced payroll service or even just a great piece of computer software.

Full-charge bookkeepers are responsible for the production of in-house monthly financial statements but also must look forward to the end of year. The annual task of organizing the records for the firm’s CPA (tax returns and audits) stretches the time span of a full-charge bookkeeper to 13 months.

A controller’s responsibilities go beyond the compilation of financial statements to controlling all financial and management control systems. This would extend to the selection of computer accounting software to the design of all administrative systems that surround that software. Companies requiring departmental financial reporting or job costing also come under the purview of the controller stretching the time span from 12 months to 24 months.

CFO responsibilities extend out beyond 24 months. From my CFO, I expect trend analysis, capacity utilization, return on capital assets, indexing to economic indicators. I expect my CFO to look at the coming recession of 2009 and tell me when we need to renegotiate our lines of credit, when we need to be stockpiling cash (in case we want to buy a troubled competitor) looking at our leases and our owned properties. Time span associated with these responsibilities goes from 24 months to 48 months.

When you begin to measure the task in relation to time span, you become extremely precise about the level of person you need to fill that role. Next week, we will take a look at how to make that judgment about members of your team and prospective candidates in your hiring process. -TF

BTW. I have a white paper I would be happy to send you listing typical time horizons for a number of disciplines. Just drop me an email, be happy to send it to you.