CPA Resources
CPA Resources

Integral Operations Finance and Lean Accounting

From the Performance Management Institute

A 12-Step Path to Integral Operations Finance and Accounting

Developed by the people behind the Financial Scoreboard and the Financial Dashboard, this 12-step path is a graphic depiction of the journey an individual or team can take to achieve immediate working knowledge of their organization's finance, accounting and performance management systems. In most cases, a team will need to cycle through the steps at least two or three times to experience shared command and unleash unhindered creativity. The path works best when actual financial statements are used.

The software tools that can help a company visualize its financial picture can be found at http://www.financialdashboard.com/ and http://www.financialscoreboard.com/.

Remember, a picture's worth a thousand numbers.

Step 1: Current Reality — Identifying and Assessing Your Present Performance Management System
This assessment allows anyone to quickly map their company's bottom lines, key drivers and KPIs.
Step 2: Indentifying gaps — Understand the disconnect in standards accounting financial statements
Step 2 shows the separate pages of the balance sheet and income statement side by side with no obvious connection, other than the company's name and the date.
Step 3: The Mobley Matrix — Discover the match that connects your financial statements
Lou Mobley discovered that by placing the beginning and ending balance sheets on the left and right edges of the page, one can put the accounts on the income statement next to the balance sheet accounts to which they connect.
Step 4: Making sense -- Reveal the common sense that unifies your financial statements
The fundamental role of accounting is to tell the basic facts of the business' story.
Step 5: Common-sense cash flow -- connect operations to bank-account activity
Step 5 shows how the discovery of the Mobley Matrix changed the course of American business.
Step 6: Return on assets -- picture your resource efficiency as a speedometer
This bottom line is generally best used to provide an annual (or sometimes quarterly) view.
Step 7: Cause and effect -- How to begin linking daily activities to financial results
Step 7 centers on the action-to-results flow chart, which lays out the progression by which the “three-bottom-line” results are created.
Step 8: Turning data into information -- give operational meaning to financial statement data
Step 8 begins giving operational meaning to financial statement data by presenting the statements color-coded in a matrix.
Step 9: At a glance -- visualize your overall score
You've heard about how the Financial Scoreboard can give you quick and concise answers to the critical questions. Now you can bring those answers to life with the Financial Dashboard.
Step 10: Bridging the GAAP
The first picture in Step 10 is the transaction map, which lays out a simplified picture of the progression by which transactions in a business accumulate.
Step 11: Huddle Magic
For command of the financials, consider these four questions in your monthly performance management huddle.
Step 12: Budget assurance
This step is a powerful grounding to implementation, shared courtesy of Mike Richardson of the Sherpa Alliance.

related course

Jahn Ballard is a leading force behind the Performance Management Institute, the Financial Scoreboard and the Financial Dashboard. He also is an instructor for the following Business Learning Institute course, sponsored by the MACPA:

Lean Accounting

The purpose of this series of articles is to discuss the failure of traditional cost and managerial accounting methods using both current and historical context, to develop the importance of the relationship between the physical Lean enterprise and accounting (or cost management), and to present specific methods and discuss how and why they function effectively for a lean enterprise.

Integral Operations Finance: An introduction to Lean Accounting
Accounting has been a finance staple for as long as most can recall. But this has not always been the case in business, particularly in manufacturing.
Lean Accounting meets Integral Operations Finance
Examine how Lean Practice and Integral Operations Finance can make the essence of the Toyota Production System fully operational for business and organizational leaders in the U.S. and beyond.
The birth of performance management in organizational leadership
This article is the first of a three-part series that examines how Lean Accounting and the emerging practice of Integral Operations Finance can converge into a whole-systems approach that provides the advantages of the Toyota Production System,...
Integrating Operation Finance practices, the Mobley Matrix, Financial Scoreboard and Lean Accounting into a complete system
Here's a unique approach to integrating the needs of operational people with the needs of company leadership.