How do you set up a self-service portal for accounting requests?

Set up each routine request to accounting as a service in the employee portal catalog, with its own form, required fields, assignee, and due date. An employee picks the service and fills in the form, and the request goes straight to the right specialist instead of a shared inbox.

Which requests to move to the portal first

Collect a month of statistics: how many requests come in, of what types, and from which departments. Start with the highest-volume requests and the ones that need the most follow-up questions. These are usually:

• income and employment verification letters;
• invoice payment requests;
• account reconciliation statements with vendors and customers;
• requests for supporting documents;
• expense reports after business trips.

How to describe a service

• Form. Make every field the team cannot work without required. Some fields fill in automatically: for example, payment details and the tax ID come from the contract directory.
• Assignee. Requests are routed to accounting work groups: payments and bank transactions, accounts payable and receivable, employee letters and payroll, expense reports and business travel, fixed assets.
• Approval. Only where it is needed. For example, an invoice payment request is checked against the budget for its expense category and sent to the department head for approval.
• Due date. Each service has its own, set in the service level agreement (SLA), and indicators warn in advance when a deadline is at risk. The employee and the accountant both see the status and due date, so nobody has to call and chase.

This is how ITG Corporation scaled the service approach: after IT, accounting and facilities were the first departments to join the SimpleOne platform. In the group, legal, accounting, and financial support for all companies, including international ones, is run as a dedicated service hub.

What changes for accounting

Letters are ordered through a form, and after a business trip request the system creates a task to submit the expense report. The head of accounting sees:

• how many requests come in for each area;
• how the workload is spread and when it peaks, for example at month-end and quarter-end;
• average handling time and the share of requests that breached the SLA.

At ITG Corporation, request processing time in the connected departments dropped by 24%, and customer satisfaction rose by 35% thanks to standardized services and fixed SLAs.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. Accounting gets its own service catalog in the self-service portal:

• the service, form, assignee, and due date are set in the service catalog;
• requests are routed to work groups automatically;
• approvals and SLA tracking run in the same system.

If the company already uses SimpleOne ITSM, accounting joins the same portal where employees submit IT requests.

See how it looks for accounting on the accounting request portal page.