Finally back to it!

After a long break (and a push from the other Directors in the business) I’m getting back to writing regular blogs, so if you’re reading this I hope you enjoy it.

This year there have been huge changes and growth across our existing and new businesses, too much to detail out in one blog, which I’ll cover in the coming months. To begin with, I just wanted to let you know what my last week has looked like.

For the past 2 days I have been at a sales and closing training event in Birmingham (while testing out staying in our own SA), Wednesday I was in Northampton running our Business and Property Mastermind, helping business owners with their next steps and their overall Business Plans, Tuesday I spent the day with Mylo as Ella was with her nanny, Monday I caught up with the team in the office working on priorities for the week, the weekend was the weekend   and last Friday I was head down in spreadsheets (earphones in, hacker mode!).

If I could, I’d spend every one of my working days in hacker mode, automating reports and KPIs and improving business data using spreadsheets (SUMIFS, Conditional Formatting, Graphs… lovely).

82% of small businesses fail due to cash flow problems with most business owners rating cashflow as their number 1 risk.

So how do you manage cashflow? Data! - live, accurate, automated data in easy to read formats so you can make business decisions quickly to the benefit of your business.

Knowing your data is vital within a business as it helps; identify problems, find bottlenecks, highlight poor performance, see unnecessary costs and more. Ultimately to come to the answer of ‘We need to do X to improve Y’.

I love spreadsheets. Solving businesses perceived problems of managing business finance and getting real time reports and data (I’ve been doing it from day 1 as an accounting apprentice all those years ago). So many people get stressed by this, ignore it until it becomes a mountain, have no idea where to start and fly their business blind as they don’t know their results. So make sure you spend some time now, setting this up right, setting up your accounting system to give you the right data, automating reports from this data, linking in data from your other systems, and make it easy to analyse so you can focus on making decisions and the high value tasks that you need to be focussing on for your business.

What are the biggest challenges you are facing in managing your businesses finance?