Your business will grow successfully and run smoothly, if you give fundamental importance to knowing and understanding your business finances, and make use of professional bookkeeping in York.
This is a valuable lesson that I learnt while running a chain of bookshops that needed me to keep on top of the finances needed for running my business. My bookshops, Archway Books, are in an area spread all over the north of England. This never took me more than a few minutes a day, to cash up and add all the totals to spreadsheets. Once I did this, I was always aware of how all the shops had done on sales. This allowed me to compare these figures with those of the previous year, month or week, and was of help to the cash flow and for pushing he business forward. It also helped to ensure that invoices were raised on time, and allowed me to chase late payments before I supplied any more books to defaulting parties. The key to running my bookshops was in following these steps and the accurate bank reconciliation that they were combined with.
I am quite comfortable working with numbers and even enjoy it, so taking care of my own bookkeeping was never a hardship. Most people are not happy working with numbers. Most people when they set up a business tend to focus on other aspects than bookkeeping, and give a low priority to the maintaining of accurate records.
Important areas of running your business are customer relations, technology, marketing, and sales, but good bookkeeping is equally essential if you want to have a business that is expanding and running smoothly, and this is an area that must not be avoided.
While you can always invest in learning effective bookkeeping and all its aspects, this can take up a lot of your time. The alternative is to outsource the work to a specialist. There are physical costs of outsourcing parts of your business, in this case bookkeeping, but you must also be aware of the value that this can bring to your business. You will be freed of the time you spent doing bookkeeping, have peace of mind and no sleepless nights, focus on what you know is best for your business, and can always cover deadlines, knowing that your business finances are under someone’s watchful eye.
Bookkeeping has become largely automated in recent times and this gives you an extensive choice of reports, each of which can give you a better understanding of your financial position. Are you making the most of these reports? You need to be familiar with Profit and Loss reports, and how they differ from Balance sheets or Statement of Financial Positions, all of which can show you how your business is doing financially. You need to understand how asset values depreciate over time. There is a whole list of financial terms that can make the process quite daunting.
All the same, once you are on top off your finances you will not be paying penalties for late submission of accounts, and will have access to up to date accounts that can help you with the cash flow. This is an important point. My experience is that most businesses leave their accountant to complete yearly accounts. It is necessary to have your accounts checked more often, by your bookkeeper, if you are not able to do so. Keep a close eye on your accounts so that you ae monitoring key indicators of the profit margins of your business, and this will allow you to plan for better cash flow, as you know both the net and gross figures of your expected turnover.