How do you reduce repetitive employee questions to accounting?

Collect a month of employee questions and split them into two groups. If the answer is the same for everyone, a knowledge base article covers it. If the accountant needs the employee's data or has to prepare a document, it's a service with a request form. Every article needs a responsible accountant who updates it when the rules change.

How to find repetitive questions

For a month, record every question that comes to accounting: by email, in messengers, by phone, and in person. Group them by meaning, not by wording: "When is payday?", "Has my paycheck arrived?", and "Why hasn't my paycheck arrived?" are one question.

For each group, note how many times the question came in and whether the answer is the same for all employees. Start with the most frequent groups, where the accountant answers with the same words every time. How to estimate at the same time how much time accounting spends on requests is covered in the answer on calculating the workload of accounting or a shared services center (SSC).

What to cover with an article and what with a form

A knowledge base article works when the answer is the same for all employees:

• on which days salaries are paid;
• how to fill in an expense report and which documents to attach;
• the deadline for submitting an expense report after a business trip. Take it from your travel and expense policy. If employees learn the deadline and the list of documents from an article before the trip, accountants have to send reports back for corrections less often.

A service with a form works when the accountant has to look at the employee's data or prepare a document: an income verification letter, a question about a line on the pay stub, submitting an expense report. A form with required fields saves the back-and-forth about "which period?" and "how many copies?" When all the information is collected at the moment the request is created, less time goes to emails with the requester.

How to describe such a service is covered in the answer on setting up a self-service portal for accounting requests. Often you need both: the article explains the rule and ends with a link to the service for submitting documents.

How to write an article people can find

• The title is in the employee's words: "When is payday," not "Payroll disbursement procedure."
• The answer is in the first line; details and exceptions come below.
• Step-by-step instructions and a completed sample, if the employee has to fill something in.

It's better to prepare articles before the portal launches, so employees find answers from day one. At ITG Corporation, the knowledge base with intelligent search sits on the same service portal as the catalog, and employees can find answers there on their own.

How to maintain articles

• Each article has a responsible accountant or group.
• Articles are reviewed when regulations or internal procedures change: different paydays, new document requirements.
• If a question keeps coming in even though there's an article, employees can't find it. Rename the article using the words from the questions, and link to it when you reply to the employee.
• A one-time change, such as a new deadline for documents before the year-end close, is communicated with an announcement, and the article is updated.

How it works in SimpleOne ESM

SimpleOne ESM is a set of SimpleOne platform tools for managing internal services (enterprise service management, ESM). Accounting knowledge base articles in it:

• are organized into categories and written in a block editor;
• are assigned by category to a responsible group or employee;
• are published with a status (draft, published, or hidden from the portal) that shows whether employees can see the article.

Learn more in the SimpleOne ESM documentation.

If the company uses SimpleOne ITSM, the IT service management system, the SimpleOne ITSM AI assistant can answer employees based on these articles. It works through the integration with SimpleOne Ainergy and is configured separately. That's why an outdated article also produces an outdated answer. What the options are, including an AI assistant over the knowledge base, is covered in the answer on tools that cut repetitive questions to accounting.