Owning a business involves lots of responsibilities. Even if you own a small business, you must make sure that it runs at maximum efficiency. It’s essential that you organize your workplace, make a set of rules, build communication between them and check that they should get enforced. Workplace governance doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to control your employees. A nice set of work rules can keep your employees motivated, productive and creative. Here we discuss financial compliance and how it works.
What Is Financial Compliance?
Financial compliance is about making it inevitable that a business company follows all the essential rules. The investor must remain confident, and markets also remain efficient, fair and transparent. Over the years, marketing compliance systems have become complex and sophisticated as lawmakers work to keep track of everything, from trading activity and account standards to money laundering and tax evasion. New rules come up after any crash or economic crisis, where the major push comes towards an increased regulation. A similar kind of thing happened after the 2008 financial crisis, which exposed many leaks in the US banking system.
How Does Financial Compliance Work?
For your small business, you need a BAS agent Perth for filing the statement and a compliance officer in charge of financial services. This person may be a general counsel (who may be an in-house lawyer) or a compliance officer. They monitor whether the company follows all the external as well as internal regulations. To meet compliance requirements, businesses must show that they have a well-structured compliance system and meet other business conduct requirements. Business conduct requirements include financial reporting, insurance requirements, and working capital and bonding requirements. If any modifications are made, they must inform the regulators.
What Type Of Risk Do They Usually Manage?
As already said, it’s the compliance officer’s job to make sure that the company maintains all the laws. These include honest and faithful dealings with all the clients, avoiding conflicts of interest and maintaining account books and significant sales and purchase records, which will reflect all their business activities and various transactions.
Compliance officers should stay on top of their industry performances. They should keep an eye on possible trouble-making situations and figure out crucial solutions to avoid the risks. Now, new rules have been introduced, where all the dealers and advisors must make sure that any security sale or purchase recommended for a client is appropriate. In addition to that, financial firms should also check whether all the marketing materials, websites, and performance data are disclosed clearly and adequately. Dealers and advisors provide these data and client-specific information.
How Can You Maintain Good Work Rules?
Here we discuss several ways which you may follow to maintain a good workplace environment.
- Address legal aspects
This is the primary step to set up a workplace governance system. You should consult with an employment attorney who can get you to understand different laws that are regarding rights or workers. Because, if not aware, your work rules may lead to harassment, discrimination and complaints from unions. As an owner, you might never like such things.
After you have prepared your new rules and regulations for your business, you should discuss with the attorney to check whether they meet all the local, state and federal laws. You should also discuss with your insurance provider, who can provide you with the necessary assistance in instituting policies, enhancing safety and reducing lawsuits and insurance claims.
- Organization
Before setting all the rules and regulations, you should know who will be responsible for enforcing them and who will follow them. So, you must design an organization chart very accurately, where superiors and subordinates should be mentioned. Each of your employees can get to know who works under him or who his supervisor is. You should also create a detailed employment description for them, from the trustee or president to the receptionist. This will improve your company’s overall performance and decrease the chance of lawsuits.
- Workplace rules
You must have a set of specific workplace rules and regulations that will apply to all the employees. These will include timely attendance, code of dress, behaviour, leave policies, sick and personal day policies, utilization of company equipment, theft, fraudulence, record keeping, and submission of expense reports, safety and making grievances. It’s best to present all these rules in a written form and get each of them to sign a written statement that he or she has read and understood all the rules and policies.
- Representation
Characteristically, business owners do not like unionization. Still, you should understand that your employees must have one or more representatives to discuss when there occur workplace issues with the management. They can give helpful ideas and inputs, thus helping you to avoid imposing rules that may result in workers’ agitation. If you listen to them, that will also create a positive vibe to feel of themselves as an essential part of the organization. You may encourage instituting an informal committee of the workers.
- Communication
In any organization, all the members or workers should have a reasonable means of communication among them. As an owner, you should communicate your workplace rule to make sure that they are pretty effective and help you achieve business goals. If you do not get your workplace copies signed by your employees, you may face the consequences like legal liabilities. The employees may later claim ignorance. It is always better to present all these rules in a formal meeting arranged by yourself. You should ask for their valuable feedback so that they can feel that you will review and update these rules periodically.
- Review
Carry out a regular review of your workplace rules so they can apply to the current situation. If any worker wants to give practical suggestions for these rules, you should allow him or her to go ahead.
Ending Note
The principal objective of any business is to generate revenue. So, before setting rules, you may also consult with an accountant in Perth to know about specific financial laws.