Running A Business - The Financial Hat
Failing to watch and take care of your finances can kill your business! Whether it is accounts payable, accounts receivable, taxes, or day to day bookkeeping, small mistakes can hurt!
Yet if you do it right, you can produce reports that help guide you and make correct decisions about your business. Forms like profit & loss, income projections and balance sheets.
This information can help if you ever need to go to a bank or other souce and borrow money.
This is one area I dislike the most. I find that doing financial tasks take a lot of my time away from actually doing business. And when I am done, I worry it was done correctly!
Usually at tax time, I find I did do some things wrong!
I have always done my own taxes using some of the popular tax software choices from the local office supply store. This is the first year I decided to use a professional bookkeeper and tax man. One reason why I chose to not do my own is that I have heard that, especially this year, the IRS is auditing a higher percentage of returns on those who do thier own. I guess the IRS thinks the do-it-yourselfers will probably make the most mistakes!
Today, take your form you downloaded last week (business hats) and work in the column called “Financial”. List all the things you personally do on a weekly basis in your business that deals with financial tasks.
Items could be accounts payable, accounts receivable, taxes, banking, bookkeeping, or payroll. There are dozens more!
If you hire someone to do this, you still have lots of tasks you personnally do. Or traveling to and from the bookkeeper. But list all the things you personally do.
When you have your list completed, put the hours to the right of each item that you spend each week. Then total the items and write that in the bottom corner and circle it.
Tomorrow we will work on Production.
Global Marketing Plus was started to help small businesses compete on the same level as large corporations but for a lot less expense.
January 12th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
Gosh I hate all the ‘business’ side of my business. I have a bookkeeper who comes to me, but I still have to create my invoices, and make deposits. Not sure why it’s so tough for me to do, but I would much rather write.