Running a business is time consuming; the last thing you want to be doing is worrying about your finances. Whether you’re in the fashion, hospitality, medical, manufacturing, construction or any industry, looking at your current and past numbers gives you predicted insight into how you should make business decisions in the future.
Designed as a quick guide, in this blog, we will explore how utilising the correct reports gives you an advantage in more ways than one. We call this bookkeeping for business.
Know Your Numbers
Telling the story of your business through regular reporting, your business reports allow you to interpret your business activity and overall results. The more you understand your numbers, the better your decision-making will be and therefore your overall business results.
At Achieve, we want to share the benefits of understanding your numbers, give you an overview of the standard reports and provide helpful tips on using them to improve your business.
The Benefits of Knowing Your Numbers
Putting you in a far stronger position to make informed decisions and measure the impact of those decisions, knowing your numbers gives you realistic results. This enables you to take corrective action where it is needed and plan for long-term financial success. Knowing your numbers will allow you to:
Understand Whether Your Business is Growing or Shrinking
These are crucial facts to your business. This information gives you hard numbers about the growth of your business or lack thereof. It also gives you insight into how your business will be doing in the future with your current plan.
Track Trends Over Time
You may have thought your current business plan is a good one; but you might be sorely mistaken when you begin to understand your numbers. This allows you to compare results between years or different periods and compare results to your expectations (as set in your budget).
Showing you the trends of the decisions you’ve made over time, knowing your business reports allows you to see what has or hasn’t worked in the past – helping you to make more informed business decisions down the line.
Identify Areas of Strength and Weakness
Are you paying too much in one area that isn’t providing any profit? See where your business is thriving and where it is lacking! Understanding your finances can help you identify symptoms of underlying problems.
Measure!
Knowing your numbers allows you to measure your business efficiency and the overall value of your business. It also gives you the stats to measure your cash flow to understand where you are spending too much or not enough in certain areas.
Make Better Business Decisions
Overall, knowing your numbers gives you the insight and the information to understand where your business is at. It allows you to make informed decisions about the future of your business – because numbers don’t lie!
Achieve Business
At Achieve, we do more than keep books; we take your business and look at it from a holistic point of view. This allows us to create strategies based around your business’s finances, allowing you to fulfil short term and long-term goals. Contact us today to talk about your unique situation and how we can help you improve your business.
We will be running a free webinar in late May called “Knowing Your Numbers”
Reach out if you want an invite!
