Financials can help manage day to day business processes so you can focus on running your business
Some ways to streamline your financials include:
- Use Readysell cash book to balance your cash at bank figures
- Use Readysell general ledger for your financial reporting
- If you are using cash basis GST reporting consider moving to accrued basis GST reporting.
- Cloud Payroll with KeyPay allows your employees to print their own reports and group certificates
- Batch email sale invoices to customers at the end of each day
- Batch email statements at end of month
- Your customers know how to reprint their own invoices and statements from a website
- Bank reconciliation automatically matched against the bank
- Supplier payments automatically generated and transmitted to the bank Via ABA file
- Weekly automatic email to customers with overdue accounts
Financials can inform you about current business issues
Ensure that you regularly check:
- Aged debtors position once a week
- Aged supplier balances. Compare your supplier to debtor balances to see if money coming in from customers will be sufficient go cover payments to suppliers
- Profit and loss report. In particular look at trends in revenue and expenses.
- Cash at bank
Decide if you want to bracket all credits on financial reports or to bracket exceptions
- Some accountants like to see brackets around exceptions. For example if your car loan is normally a credit, showing you owe money on your loan. Show loan's value in a bracket if the net value of the loan becomes a debit. This would mean the bank would owe you money in respect to the car loan. This is an exception so it would be shown in brackets
- Some accountants just like to see all credits in brackets.
- See: http://www.accountingcoach.com/blog/use-of-parentheses
Financials can only work for you if your bookkeeper has the necessary skill and training
It might be worth changing or training your bookkeeper so you can get the most benefit from your Financials. Your book keeper should be:
- Well trained in Readysell financials. Unless they are properly trained bookkeepers tend to develop bad habits and may not use the system as well as possible
- If possible trained in bookkeeping.
- A detail person who completes all tasks in a timely and organised manner. Financial errors or delays cost you money, perhaps a lot of money
- Using profit and loss reports to track revenue and expenses. Don't wait to end of year, by then any damage is already done. Ensure your book keeper informs you about any important trends
- Aware of your business information requirements. At least once a month they should report to you on accounts that are overdue, debtors vs. supplier balances, your cash position
- Reporting to you when they notice exceptions that you should be considering
- Make some effort to keep you with changes in tax and financial reporting requirements
- Suggesting ways you can improve your financial and business processes.
General ledger budget figures let you measure actual performance against your expectations. The general ledger figures are of not much use on their own. At some point you have to compare your general ledger results against some expected standard. The budget figures allow you to record your expected results, your business plan, in advance. Then to monitor actual performance to see if you are meeting your goals. All well run business enterprises have a business plan and compare results against the plan. Best practice is to enter general ledger budgets, at least on a few key accounts like revenue and expenses, at the start of the year. Then every month check your results against your expectation. If the business is not performing as expected, you will have time to do something about it before the end of the year. There are two types of Budgets being either Monthly or Daily.Make use of General ledger budgets Monthly budgets are manually entered or imported however the daily ones can only be imported.