What Are Policies and Procedures?

Policies and procedures refer to the documentation on how a business runs. A policy is a set of rules and guidelines which an organization and the employees must follow to achieve compliance. Policies reflect what an employee does and why they do it. A procedure is an instruction on how a policy is followed. These are step-by-step instructions for how policies can be achieved. Therefore, policy defines a rule and procedure defines who is expected to do what and how.

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Top 10 reasons to create policy and procedure manual.

• They establish a standard on how to do things
• They make sure decisions are made and documented by members of the board.
• They communicate the same message to all staff, board members and volunteers
• They provide clear expectations to make it more likely that staff, board members and volunteers will meet or exceed those expectations
• They may attract more volunteers to your organization
• They make sure important information on how to do things is not lost when an employee leaves the organization
• They promote fair and equitable treatment of others
• They show you’ve complied with applicable legislation
• They reduce conflict, and
• They help your organization mitigate risks

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Why Document Policies and Procedures?

Helps in Reducing negative findings in audits: Results from unacceptable audit can disrupt a business with fines and other violations. Often non-compliance found during an internal or external audit can be tracked from inconsistencies and non-documentation of P&Ps.

Systematic help desk: Most help desk requests could be eliminated if employees were able to easily find and understand previously published policies, procedures, and documentation.

Decrease in missed deadlines: Employees under pressure to meet deadlines cant waste time to look for hard to find information, whether it’s for review, update, documenting compliance information or employee performance appraisal, employees need easy accessible and reliable source of information to find out what they are looking for, how they need to do it while not missing the deadlines.

Clear and effective P&P can help employees save time and ensure that deadlines are met.

Reducing incorrectly completed, or documented forms: P&P also educates employees on documented forms, whether its an expense report, benefits submission, or holiday request. If the process gets slowed down or the forms are submitted incorrectly then it can take days or weeks to process a simple form. This would result in lost of productivity which could have been solved effectively if P&P were in place.

Prevention of regulatory investigation: Documentation of processes and procedures are one of the fundamental methods an organisation can demonstrate to regulatory authorities that critical policies and procedures  are adhered to. This will save the organisation time, reputation and ensure business continuity.

Reducing employee mistakes: Right P&P ensures all employees have guidelines to follow when undertaking business processes. If the P&P is hard to find, incorrect, or out-of-date all the blames fall on the organisation or the management even if the mistakes are been made by the employees.

Enhanced Client/Customer reputation: An organisation which aspires to achieve standard accreditations such as ISO9001, ISO14001 etc. would need to ensure that documentation of their P&P as a minimum. Moreover, when tendering new business to clients, many companies would have strict procurement pre-qualification processes, which would require the documentation of P&P.

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Premier Brains objective is to add value and improve the operations of your business.

We provide following functions to assist the management in standardizing various activities in the business:

• Developing Financial & Accounting Policies and procedures manual
• Developing Financial delegation of authority matrix
• Financial restructuring
• Reviewing effective utilization of resources
• Developing incentive policies for the staff
• Developing risk management policy and procedure