How much does your accountant know about sales tax? Maybe not as much as you think. A startling number of accounting professionals botched basic questions about sales tax, from online tax to nexus to audit risk (according to a recent Wakefield survey*).
I have been consulting now for over 27 years. When I first started, verbal communication was the accepted and expected way of exchanging ideas, concerns, and complaints. It was efficient and thus you completed your objectives in a timely manor.
Then came the 90’s and the Internet. Email entered our world and people started exchanging ideas via email. We still called each other to discuss issues and exchange information, but email slowly started making it’s way into how we communicate. People felt it was more efficient; they got more done because they could work on other tasks while waiting for a response.
Then the 21’st century came and everything really started to explode…
As a first step to any project, gathering and understanding requirements is vital to your success; and yet we spend little to no time on this very important process. Identifying and involving the appropriate stakeholders during the requirements phase is just as important as eliciting those perfect requirements.
I spent many years as a business analyst, and I have found that for me the most effective way to elicit requirements was to conduct requirement workshops. In this workshop, I identify specific topics on my agenda and pick stakeholders with clout, i.e. those that are well versed in their specific business units. Also, I push for using stakeholders from different business units to give the workshop the benefit of multiple perspectives.
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