A little bit of well-loved data can go a long way in advancing your business.
If you nurture your financial health, your business numbers - all those invoices and bank statements and receipts - they’ll talk to you. They’ll give you lots of useful and important advice - but first, you have to translate them.
Follow a Consistent Plan
First things first, stop using spreadsheets and get yourself a QuickBooks subscription (with a full year discount through a QuickBooks Certified ProAdvisor).
Start tracking your Business Transactions in QuickBooks Online (... more details)
Follow this Monthly Reminder for Bookkeeping Homework (... more details)
In the beginning, QuickBooks is just an empty processor - but once you start feeding it consistent data over a span of several months, patterns and averages will start to emerge.
Just make sure that you update it at least once a month - unless you take the time to feed it the data it needs, the software simply can’t produce the info you need to make decisions in your business. And the longer you go without updating it, the more likely you are to lose receipts, forget important items, and miscategorize unusual transactions.
And if you feel like you need help with that level of consistency, just reach out!
Reading the Reports
As an accounting and bookkeeping professional, I LOVE the financial reports that softwares like QuickBooks create, but I know that the reports are only truly useful if the data gets entered correctly. It’s way more than just entering your Staples receipts as “Office Supplies”.
REVIEW: Most Important Reports (... more details)
REVIEW: Get into the Details (... more details)
REVIEW: Payees for ALL Transactions (... more details)
Are personal expenses mixed in with business expenses? Is there non-operating revenue lumped in with the operating revenue? Those questions matter if you’re trying to get useful information from your reports - you’re trying to create a set of data ONLY about your business efforts.
Once you do that, you can turn all those receipts and bank statements into truly useful financial reports, like a Profit and Loss Report, that will be helpful for the future of your business.
Convert Reports into Action Plans
This is where the magic happens, where your carefully organized data starts to become the information you need for future plans and growth.
Save for Taxes (... more details)
Emergency Fund (... more details)
Applying for a Loan (... more details)
Are you trying to decide which services or goods you should double-down on, or which less-than-lucrative stream you should consider discontinuing? Maybe you need to find a category to cut expenses to increase your profit margin? You’ve now got a well-oiled data machine that will tell you all of that.
REVIEW: Get into the Details (... more details)
Not only that, but now you have an important baseline for collaborating with other professionals who can help you with your business planning.
Having good habits for this stuff will keep your investors confident, your lenders at ease, and your tax preparers happy. And - bonus - consistently tracking your operating revenue is good for your company’s stock prices {think BIG GOALS}, too.
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