Business Process Help

[Chris A.]

Haven't been on BP in a while, but thought this would be a good way to refocus. Would anyone be wiling to share resources, templates, examples that could be used to help develop a business process manual?

I'd like to create a kind of internal operating procedure manual for property managers, book keepers, deal analysis, and....myself haha. I see this as more specific than a business plan and something that I could share with partners and employees to help keep us all focused on the important tasks. Any ideas? 

[Jeff B.]

Here goes;

• Create one page per task; objective at the top and the RESULT you want to achieve at the bottom
• Define the players; those that actually perform actions to reach your goal(result)
• Top-down is sometimes difficult, so work backward from the result to the last step take.  Then move backward again to define the action that was required to provide the inputs to the last step
• continue crawling upward until you reach that point where there is just the objective and then inputs have to be defined

for example:  Creating an invoice:

1. accounting access to accounts receivable 
2. account gets the customer info
3. decide the project or purpose of the invoice
4. open New Invoice
5. enter customer info
6. enter today's date and the date payment is due
7. itemize the parts & labor on the invoice
8. enter the terms of payment (DOD, net-10, net-30)
9. print the invoice / email the invoice
10. save and close the New Invoice

Print the above and file in your Procedure Manual.

Yeah, that's obvious and trivial but now start on an important procedure that needs to be documented:  Screening Tenant Applications.  This one will have two exit points: Denied & Accept+Offer residence.