How do you build a service catalog for accounting and a shared services center?

Build the service catalog for accounting and the shared services center (SSC) from real employee requests, not from the accounting org chart. Name each service after what the employee wants to get: "Get an income verification letter," not "Payroll accounting." The catalog needs an owner who reviews it based on request statistics.

How to compile the list of services

• Export a month or a quarter of requests from email, messengers, and phone calls and sort them by type. At the same time, ask the accountants in each area what information is missing from requests and where processing stalls.
• Keep only what employees ask for. Period-end close and journal entries are internal accounting work and don't belong in the employee catalog.
• Merge similar requests. A signed paper letter and a PDF letter are one service with an option on the form, not two.
• Group services the way employees look for them: "Letters and documents," "Business travel and expenses," "Vendor invoice payments." The accounting work groups that fulfill the services may be organized differently, and the employee doesn't need to know that.
• Flag services that span several departments. Onboarding a new hire, for example, involves HR, IT, facilities, and accounting. In an SSC where accounting, procurement, and other functions work side by side, there are especially many of these. For an example with a business trip and an expense report, see the answer on software for employee requests to accounting.

Which requests to move to the portal first is covered in the answer on setting up a self-service portal for accounting requests.

How to name a service in the employee's words

Build the name from a verb and a result: "Get proof of payment for an invoice," "Approve a vendor invoice for payment," "Submit an expense report after a business trip." Accounting jargon in the name gets in the way. If you can't avoid a term, such as "account reconciliation statement," explain in the description what it is and when it's needed.

Take the wording from employees' emails: you already have it in the request export. Before launch, ask a few colleagues from other departments to find a service by its name. If they can't find it on the first try, rename it.

The goal is a catalog anyone can navigate without knowing who does what. At ITG Corporation, the employee service catalog covers everything from ordering office supplies to legal advice, and every service is a few clicks away.

What to describe for a service besides the form

The form, assignee, approval, and due date are covered in the answer on accounting requests, in the "How to describe a service" section. For the catalog, you also need:

• What the employee gets: a scan or an original, and where to pick it up.
• What to prepare in advance: receipts, the contract, payment details, and a sample for complicated cases.
• The service owner: an accountant who is responsible for the service description and its due date.

How to maintain the catalog

Only one catalog owner should add and remove services: the head of accounting, the SSC lead, or someone they appoint. Otherwise the catalog fills up with duplicates. Reasons to update it:

• the same request keeps showing up in the free-form "Other question" service, so it needs a service of its own;
• a service gets no requests, so merge it with a neighboring one or remove it;
• accountants keep asking about the same field, so fix the form;
• a procedure has changed, for example the list of documents for an expense report, so update the description the same day. Otherwise the employee collects documents from the old list, the report is sent back, and they have to start over.

You don't have to describe everything at once. At Commonwealth Partnership, about 20 services in the service catalog cover 80% of employees' IT needs. Start with a small catalog and add services as more departments join.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services. In the service catalog:

• each service has two descriptions: a short one on the card and an explanation on the form;
• the catalog settings list its managers, the users who are allowed to change it;
• the department head sees performance metrics in reports.

Where to run the catalog and how the options differ is covered in the answer on tools for an accounting and SSC service catalog.