Saving you time with a new idea around delegation of onerous tasks, and tips for quick audits to keep an eye on things without too much involvement on your part.

In general, staff see finance as the domain of the PM. Of course, in large practices PMs may have a finance assistant to help with this. Whether you already delegate some of this to other staff, or you are anxious about doing so, we’ve got some ideas about things you could delegate safely that could save you time and effort.

Plan:

What: Delegate some of the more manageable financial tasks so you can concentrate on the bigger picture.

Who: You’ll need to choose a member of the admin team who’s confident with numbers and is conscientious; there’s no point delegating this to someone who may not get it right.

Resources: None – and you should be able to delegate this in five minutes or less.

Benefits: Increased PM time, and additional upskilling of staff.

How long (estimated): Should free up half an hour plus per week, depending on the size of your practice and how thoroughly you check things at the moment.

Related KLOEs: (These are the KLOEs we think this task could be used as evidence for)

E3.2 How are the learning needs of all staff identified? Do staff have appropriate training to meet their learning needs that covers the scope of their work, and is there protected time for this training?

E3.3 Are staff encouraged and given opportunities to develop?

(If you are using CQC Manager as part of the Compliance Package, you can cross-map these to Quality Statements quickly and easily)

What to do:

Think about your existing process for invoice checking; do invoices come straight to you, do you have a purchase-order system and, if not, how do you authorise and check what has been ordered?

While an official purchase-order system might seem time-consuming and irritating, it’s the first step towards ensuring that a robust system for financial management is in place; it provides clear accountability. It gives parameters for who can agree to what spending. In turn, this should offer better profitability.

That said, if you don’t want to implement a system of purchase orders, you can still delegate invoice checking quickly while retaining a fair amount of control.

To delegate invoice checking, you need to make sure that delivery notes are retrieved from deliveries and can therefore be checked against the invoice.

Depending on how you file invoices, you might just need to point to the supplier file, or you might need to set up purchase ledger access for the person you’re delegating the task to, if you give invoices a unique number and file them in order.

In either case, if you want to delegate quickly and have robust control of your invoices, you just need to ask the staff member to check the incoming invoices against the previous invoice value per item. Checking ensures that any discrepancies are highlighted, and you can investigate further.

The delivery note should be checked against goods received and then against the invoice. Then the invoice is checked against prior purchases. If the price per item and amounts are in line with previous invoices, these invoices can be passed for payment. Invoices can be flagged for further checks if the staff member identifies a discrepancy. If this protocol is followed, you should be able to hand over invoice checking without any more thought.

If you’ve been a bit less robust with your checks up to now, you can still hand over invoice checking, but you might need to carry out a bit more due diligence before you do so. If you’ve subscribed to PPA Manager, you should be able to check the reimbursement rate and NHS projected cost for thousands of medicines, whether they’re PPA reclaimable or not. The toolkit should help you to review invoices and negotiate with suppliers if necessary.

If you can, look at your non-clinical purchases for the last 12 months and compile an average list for 12 months. Send the list to a few suppliers and see what the best deal is that they can offer. When you’ve collated the list once, you’ll just need to send it out again when you want to check if you’re getting the best possible prices.

Helpful hint:  If you hand over invoice checking, make sure you audit frequently; check the invoice values and cost per item versus the previous year, or the last six months.

Practice Index offers a range of useful training options covering all aspects of finance, from basics to advanced, within the Finance Bundle.

To help achieve more in your day, you can find other posts in our five-minute PM series here.