When you are asked for your financial information, most business owners think TAX, which is very pertinent at the moment, since there was a tax deadline at the end of January and there is a provisional tax deadline coming up at the end of February.

But financial information shouldn’t only make you think about your taxes and complying with SARS’s requirements. There are so many other important reasons to understand the finances of your business. If you’ve ever watched an episode of Dragon’s Den, you’ll know that Peter Jones always wants to know the numbers of the business, and it is fatal if the business owner doesn’t have the right information at their finger-tips!

You might not be entering Dragon’s Den any time soon but it is still important to know your numbers; what your turnover is so far and in the last month, what profit you’re making, which are your most successful products, who are your worst paying customers.

As creative entrepreneurs, we often shy away from the numbers, but the information tells a picture and sometimes a picture (or graph) can tell the story. We are using graphs more and more when communicating financial information to clients, as it is easy to see what happened and where you are going, without engaging with the numbers.

If you are not getting a clear picture of your accounting system and financial reports, give us a call and we’ll use the numbers to help you tell your story.

Trust is such an important aspect of every part of our lives. We cannot reach our full potential without someone trusting in us and trusting others. However, trust is earned and proven time and again. Would you trust your baby boy to someone you didn’t really know well? Of course not! So why do we trust our business, our resources, our finances, the baby of our blood, sweat and tears, to staff, consultants and suppliers that we don’t know very well?

When you first started out, there were 3 people in your business – me, myself and I. You opened up and locked up, you made all the payments, and you didn’t have petty cash. But as your business has grown, you’ve involved more people in your dream. You’ve put processes in place to ensure the quality of the product or service being delivered, and to ensure the performance of your staff and suppliers. What processes have you put in place to protect your assets and resources?

The following are some things that you may have done, or should do:

– Insurance for computers, equipment, personal income protection and medical

– Log books for vehicle usage to prevent personal use

– Lock away and issue out keys for computer and electronic equipment, supplies, and the office

– Lock away petty cash and give the key to only one person

For all the resources (equipment, cash, access to bank accounts) there should be written authorization that the person is allowed to use the resource. Then if something happens, it is clear who had the keys last and who was responsible.

So often there is the sad story of when the trusted bookkeeper left and a new person started. The new person stole a large sum of money and covered it up in the books. Just because one person is trust-worthy doesn’t mean everyone is. The process of checks should be in place regardless of who does the job. It protects the employee (and the other staff) from undeserved suspicion or blame.

Another reason for checks and procedures is to make sure that the financial information that you are relying on to make decisions is accurate and complete. Some ideas include:

– Written authorization for all payments

– Sequential numbering of documents to easily see if anything is missing

– Supporting documentation that provides evidence of the transaction

– Reviewed bank reconciliations

If you are concerned that you may not be able to rely on your procedures, please contact us to conduct a review of what you are currently doing and provide you with recommendations and changes to help protect your future business.

Do you save your shopping lists? My dining room table is littered with old lists written on the back of envelopes or scraps of paper, which have been pulled out of my handbag when I’m looking for something. Occasionally, I’ll bundle them up and dump them in the recycling. They are no longer useful.

Now imagine if I kept all the lists and each week compared what I bought with the last week? Over time I’d be able to draw some insights from the information, such as how often we bought toilet paper, how much we spent on average over a month, or how much the hot chocolate quantity increased over winter. Now the lists are useful, have value and can help our family make decisions around our spending. This is Financial Reporting and it works the same for your business.

The key element necessary for reporting to be useful is there has to be a comparison of some kind:

– Compare this week to last week to establish trends;

– Compare the reality to the plan (the budget); or

– Compare the income to the expenses to see if the activity is viable.

For comparison to be valuable, the items you are comparing need to be for the same period and for the same thing. If I want to know if the price of oranges has increased since last week, I need to compare oranges with oranges and not oranges with apples. Also, it isn’t helpful to compare what I spent on ink or paper this week with the whole of last month, it is better to compare this month with last month, to gain any useful insights.

We must not forget that the whole purpose of putting together financial reports is to provide useful information to make decisions. If the type of information or the format it’s presented in, does not give insights into the reality of the business situation, it is a waste of time. Choose wisely what you report on, as too much information can also detract from the value of the reports and confuse the decision-making process.

Next week we wrap up this series by discussing how we can reduce our financial risks.

In our series in financial management, we are talking about Recordkeeping this week. Recordkeeping comes in many different forms; people keep diaries to record their day, people keep a record of the statistics for their favourite football team, people record the rainfall on a daily basis. Each of these records serves the same purpose – to summarise information in a way that helps us to make decisions.

The same applies to financial recordkeeping in a business. Whether it is recording cash payments in one of those old-fashioned ledger books, importing bank statements into an accounting system, or typing in the details of your slips on a spreadsheet, the purpose remains, to make sense of the noise and create order from the chaos.

A recordkeeping system in your business takes all the details (payments, invoices, slips) and summarises them in the way that is useful. Typically similar items are grouped together, say, payments in a spreadsheet. These are then categorised in some way – payments for entertainment, groceries, stationery, rental, salaries, etc. In this way, we can use this information to draw out some conclusion, such as, how much are we actually spending on entertainment, how much has the spending on office consumables increased over the last 3 months, how much does leave cost the company?

The objectives of a good financial recordkeeping system are:

– To include all transactions

– To use consistent categories to be able to compare similar transactions over time

– To produce summarised information in the same format as the plan or budget

– To be a data source that is useful and relevant

– To be up-to-date on a regular basis, so the information is useful for timely decision making

Nowadays, a lot of the legwork of a recordkeeping system is automated in an accounting package. A number of accounting packages are cloud-based and inexpensive, taking the hassle out of updating a spreadsheet at the last minute.

If you are undecided or have not yet considered a financial package for your business, then please contact us for some recommendations.

Next week, we’ll look at the output from all this recordkeeping, the financial reports, where it finally starts to actually help you run your business.

As promised last week, this week we discuss Financial Planning, which has another name that we are all more familiar with, a BUDGET. A budget can be any size, for any purpose, from the Finance Minister’s budget for the country to the budget for your daughter’s birthday party. Any business, no matter what size should have a functional budget.

A budget is a way of ensuring that a limited amount of money is used in an effective way. It helps to ensure that expenditure doesn’t get out of control. We all have nightmare stories of the business project that ran over budget and out of control. Can you imagine how bad it would have been if there was no budget and the consultant or staff didn’t have any target to stay within!

A budget also assists you in knowing how much money you need to find, earn or borrow, to achieve your goal in your business. Once you have the funds, it helps you to stay within your available resources.

Your business budget should the following:

– A specific timeframe – there is a start and end date for a budget, either an event, a year, a month, a project.

– Be forward focused – a budget never deals with the past, only the future

– Detail income as well as costs – you need to know where the money is coming from to pay for the costs, this can be as detailed as necessary.

When preparing your budget for next year here are a few things to consider:

– What activities will be involved?

– What resources will be needed to perform these activities?

– What will these resources cost?

– Who will complete the activities – staff, out-sourced personnel, volunteers?

– Where will the activities occurrent for your premises, or hire a venue, or outdoors?

– What are your existing commitments – contracts and non-negotiables?

– How do these anticipated costs compare to the actual payments in the past for the same things?

Remember that your budget will be based on assumptions as the future is uncertain. Make sure you document these assumptions in case circumstances in your business change and the budget can be updated.

Next week, we’ll look at recordkeeping, a vital process for any successful business that helps track spending against your budget.

This month’s topic is financial management. Now, don’t think to yourself, my accountant does that, and move on to the next cute video of puppies. Understanding the basics of financial management is the responsibility of the business owner as much as the finance team. Without a clear idea of what financial management involves, you are setting yourself up to be the victim of fraud, mismanagement, unnecessary tax and a whole host of SARS problems. So as they say, it is better to learn a little up front, than have to do a crash course in the midst of a crisis.

So what exactly are we talking about? Financial management involves planning, controlling and monitoring the financial resources of a company in order to achieve its objectives. Although the accountants just do it for fun, we shouldn’t only be keeping track of the cash to make it to month end, there should be some objectives in place:

– Do you want to be profitable by year 3

– Do you want to break even this month

– Do you want to save for that big capital item

– Do you want to open a new branch or launch a new product

What are you working towards as a company and what are the financial implications of that goal?

There are 4 main elements or foundation blocks to financial management:

· Planning – identifying what needs to be monitored, what amount you need and how you’re going to raise it

· Recordkeeping – keeping track of what comes in and what goes out in a logical, helpful format

· Reporting – monitoring how reality matches the plan, and deciding what needs to change

· Procedures and control – making sure nothing is missed and everything is checked

Over the next few weeks, we will discuss each one of these in detail. Don’t worry, you won’t need your accountant to interpret, we’ll use English to explain.

We start a new series this week with a look at some financial management issues that every business owner should be looking at on a regular cycle, well at least twice a year. Performance Management? What is it? How do we define it and even if we get the numbers, what do we do with them? Let’s start by unpacking some of the mysteries and terms related to Performance management in your business.

The bottom line…The amount of profit a business has made is a universally accepted standard for keeping score the world over. We always measure how successful a business is by the amount of profit it has made. Banks will offer more credit to more profitable entities. It does make sense because the net profit represents the true income of the business, and consequently of the owners.

The increase in sales, gross and net profit are some of the basic Financial Performance Indicators (FPIs) that any business person would keep an eye on to ensure that the business is viable. The downside, however, is that the managers or owners get caught in the rut of profit chasing at the expense of the very reason the business was set up the in the first place.

Financial Performance Indicators are vulnerable to manipulation. Managers become obsessed with reducing costs even at the expense of the organization’s long-term viability. This is because recognition, bonuses and even promotion are linked to how profitable a manager is. These cost-cutting measures may impact negatively on staff morale, quality of products or services etc. Focusing on the bottom line disregards what actually drives the profitability of the business.

Is there a solution to this myopia? Is there a way to balance the objectives of the business to ensure longevity? We explore this in the next post.