A blog by Harmony Hagger
A book I read recently said to succeed, you need to ensure you are maintaining, reviewing, and be open to adjusting your plan as required. It made me wonder if this works on all levels and I think it really does.
For example, I’m currently saving for a house of my own and so set aside money each month towards a deposit. If I just set aside money each month into a pot the likelihood, is I won’t reach my goal. Why though?
In the meantime, I have taken money out for car insurance, additional fuel costs and holidays. If I had not been reviewing my savings regularly, I would not have noticed that I needed to cut back on some of these costs or put in additional savings if I wanted to achieve my goal. There would have been no use in checking this 6 month afterwards and then wondering where it went wrong, I needed to be checking it in real time. Month by month.
This is exactly the same with your business, you need to maintain good, tidy information, and review this to see how you are performing, and whether there are any unexpected costs which you are coming across that you maybe didn’t budget for.
You need to know what your goal is, what you need to do to reach it, and review the progress through the process.
A Study done in California showed that you are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down on a regular basis. This is believed to be due to the theory that you are clearer on your goals, your progression, and it helps you to stay focussed and accountable.
At Gascoynes we work with our clients to help them achieve their goals and we do this in many ways. The most common of these is helping them with their systems, bookkeeping procedures and training them to use software that will enhance their record keeping to enable real time reporting but the benefits are exponential.
Once you have your information up to date and reporting day to day transactions imagine how easy it would be to review the business’ performance.
We can produce monthly management reports, this helps us to analyse your position on a regular basis, notice if there are any additional costs which are out of the ordinary, and guide you on costs which we feel maybe are not benefitting your goal.
By creating the reports and information discussed above, it allows you a better chance to plan for the future as well. It will give you a better image of where your business is now.
By having management accounts, you plan for your future, as it gives you a better idea of your income, or if there are certain times of the year you have greater costs. It also helps to be able to project future plans at any stage as you can use trends to predict future outgoings that might need to be covered.
If do not maintain your understanding of your financial stability until the end of the year, it could be too late to make any dramatic changes to re-secure the stability. If you notice it going slightly off track sooner, there is much less required to make things right.
If you’ve taken the time to read this far, I’d ask you to take one minute to think if you could be doing more for your business.
If you are interested in finding out how our bookkeeping and reporting services could assist you and your company give us a call!
