April 2014 - Financial Gym for Business

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Are you one of those entrepreneurs or independent business owners who does everything you need to do to keep your business going?

You market well, you take care of your customers, and you handle your money or so you feel. Because every time someone asks you a question about your finances, it’s guaranteed it will be the one question that you can’t answer! Why is that?

You’re here probably because you do get asked questions, or you ask yourself questions about your finances where you just don’t have a clue not only how to answer them, but sometimes even where to look for the answer.

Well in my day to day business, I’m always asked various questions whether they be general financial questions, or questions specific to that particular client’s needs.

So just this week, I’ve been asked these questions already and it’s only Tuesday!

“I need to take X amount of money from the business to live on. Can I afford it?”

“This is how much sales I’m making at the moment. How much tax will I pay at the end of the year?”

“I keep putting money into the business; when will I be able to take it back out again?”

“We want to move into new premises, so I want to know if there’s going to be enough money to pay the rent?”

“Should I register for VAT?”

“When moving abroad, should we incorporate in the country we are moving to, or should we still keep the business as UK based?”

And the last one, which is my favourite and I get asked this every week:

“How come if I’m making all these sales, money is still tight?”.

In fact a few months ago, I got this little message through Facebook and the question was:

“Am I a six figure business yet?” and I replied “Yes, you really are.”

Now a few things are apparent. First of all, questions are asked in a financial form but they are really quite personal, or about the business as a whole. And even though these questions all seem quite different; I realised that the answer that I gave to pretty much all of them was the same.

In fact, it’s not even an answer; it’s actually a question that I was going to give to all of them:

“How up to date is your bookkeeping?” or “How recent are your accounts?”

And the answers that I was getting were things like:

“We’ve done nothing since the accountant did them however many months ago.”
“We’re fairly up to date but there’s some stuff missing.”
“Nothing at all. I haven’t even got bookkeeping or accounts.”

This is the number one reason why you usually find that you can’t answer the fundamental financial questions about your business that you need to know in order to make the bigger decisions.

The reality is that I could guess a lot of these questions. Because people think that I know about these things, they think that I’m able to just figure out the answer. I don’t figure out anything, I use facts. And the facts come from the data that we take from your business.

So if you don’t have the data, you don’t have the answer.

You know where I’m going with this, don’t you? Get your data, bookkeeping, accounts – whatever you want to call it – up to date! You don’t want to be working any more than a month in arrears because that is how quickly you need to know where you are to turn things around.

I’ve got a client who went through a rough time recently simply because they thought things were worse than they were, and when we brought them up to date, we saw that actually it wasn’t all that bad.

So bear with me on this one. Do what you need to do. It will pay off in the end.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS | More

To download the audio file to your computer, please right click on this link and choose save link as, or save target as, depending on your browser.

If you would rather read while you listen or you prefer to just read without the audio or video, we have provided the full transcript further down the page for you.

Be a part of the Financial Gym Inner Circle for Free. Click the link below and be amongst the first to get:

Updates on ways to improve your day to day business money and productivity issues
Free video tips and tutorials
Downloads and templates to keep and use in your business

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Transcript

If you know me, you will know that I groan when people tell me they are doing their accounts using a spreadsheet. But the truth is; I have to admit there is a case for staying well away from accounts packages.

Want to know why? Stick around I’ll tell you in a second.

If you’re here, I’m guessing you are considering or have invested in accounting software and maybe it hasn’t been as plain sailing as you had hoped.

Well there is a perfectly logical reason for that.

Hopefully this will save you time, or money or stress or all 3.

Let’s say you fancy yourself as a bit of a musician. Let’s go with drummer.

Even if drums don’t interest you stay with me, I promise you will get this.

So the drummers amongst you, just you love to create rhythms on anything you can get your hands on. Sticks in hand you tap on table tops, pans, whatever. But you are fed up with playing at it and decide you are going to do it properly and so you go and buy yourself a drum kit.

Now imagine this state of the art drum kit arrives. You walk around it so you can see it from every angle. You pick up the sticks and tap the cymbals. You touch of the skin and then you sit down and pick up the sticks. This is it. You are on the way to being the next Ringo Starr. There is a Grammy award with your name on it.

You bring the down the sticks and start creating percussion poetry. Now you are playing ok but that’s it, just ok. You go again and to your horror it suddenly hits you. You don’t really know how to play the drums.

What an anti-climax. Even worse; you parted with money. Now the thing is here; you not only don’t have the skills to play it properly, it is going to take a while to learn it and even then you cannot guarantee ever getting beyond so-so level.

That is what happens to most people when they decide to go for it and buy accounting or bookkeeping software. Once it is installed & they go through the bits they know or thought they knew. Much like the wannabe drummer they get stuck. They have just enough knowledge to make noise, but not enough to make music.

But because the software marketing blurb has told them that buying the software will solve their bookkeeping issues they push on, get demotivated, dump it and slowly but surely go back to the financial equivalent of tapping a table top…… the spreadsheet or pen & paper.

If this has happened to you, don’t blame yourself.

If I gave you Jaime Oliver’s simplest recipe and all of his kitchen tools, you still wouldn’t create the dish the way he does. And you wouldn’t expect to. He took him years to build up wealth of experience and techniques that he has. No recipe or set of pans is a substitute for that.

The same thing applies with accounting software. Even the “easy to use ones” are only easy if you know what you are doing.

So if this has been your experience. Give yourself a break.

Accept that it will take time to get good at using it or better still get someone who is good at it to do it for you.

Not only will it be one less thing on your regular to do list. You might find time to do something you really want to do with the freed up time.