Oh no! Here it goes, another blog on finances! Well sort of. I am by no means a financial expert or planner, but I do know the importance of paying attention to your business finances.
Are you paying attention to yours?
Or are you punting, procrastinating, putting it off for another day, avoiding it like the plague?
For a good while, I was punting in my own business. After all, it is a burden to stay on top of and it is not the “sexy” part of being an entrepreneur. But you know what, it is the MOST important part of being one.
If you don’t know where you stand at the very least on a monthly basis, you are shooting in the dark.
Don’t do this to yourself or your business. It is not a good place to be.
Even in franchising, you must stay on top of your money issues. In theory, it should be easier to do so with a franchise as your franchisor will be very interested in these numbers and you will be sharing your money with them.
But still, I see franchisees do the bare minimum when it comes to finances and financial planning. It is vital that you use your financial statements to tell you about the health of your business. That you make sure to reconcile your accounts each and every month. That you get a Income Statement, Statement of Cash Flows, and Balance Sheet each and every month.
For me, the only way to do this consistently was to outsource it. I tried to do it myself and I finally realized that I can’t. So I hired an outside vendor to do it for me. And you know what? It is not that expensive.
I use a company called Kahuna Accounting. They do my accounting and bookkeeping and provide me with monthly financial statements so I can see the health of my business. They also prepare the books so that it is super easy at the end of the year to just hand a packed to my tax folks and they will have everything they need, no follow ups. This saves money. Oh, and if my tax guy does have questions, I can just turn to my dedicated Kahuna CPA (that’s right, you get a dedicated CPA) to answer the questions and it is all part of the monthly fee. No additional charges.
How awesome is that? I’d say, pretty darn awesome.
But regardless of whether you use Kahuna, someone else, or just plain do it yourself, the important thing is that you DO IT. Don’t operate in “hope accounting” land. I have been there, and it is no fun.
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