“It is under the greatest adversity that there exists the greatest potential for doing good, both for oneself and others.” Dalai Lama

Personal Experiences

Everybody experiences the world differently. Things around you have different meanings for others and for some reason not everyone laughs at your jokes. Being able to communicate effectively to, and getting the best from yourself and people is at the heart of great businesses.

Working with Leaders

It’s hard working alone. Having a Trusted Adviser can allow you to explore things about your business in an objective way, that makes real, long lasting changes just happen. Working closely with you, we can also help you see more options and achieve that success that you just haven’t managed to realise.

Working with Teams

We can work with businesses to get people to work better together – creating cohesive teams and finding ways to make things happen. Modelling excellence in your business and making sure you can share that is something we excel at.

Being at work should be fun and rewarding

“It’s clearly a budget. It’s got a lot of numbers in it.” George W Bush, Reuters, May 5, 2000.

Budgets

In addition to providing targets, a budget contains many assumptions and expectations that can give you a vast treasure of information. Not only should you ensure you have a budget showing your projected results, but you also need to ensure you forecast your cash flow – too important to leave to chance don’t you think?

Sound easy? It actually is, but you have to model your business. Just the process of doing so, creates insights and understanding that may not otherwise be available.

Take a look at any successful business, and you will see that they all plan their businesses and do budgets. The secret is that the value is not in aligning to your budgets, but discovering why you don’t.

Cash Flow

Cash flow forecasting allows businesses to make timely decisions. It’s not hard to do at all but it will make the difference between a business that is around for a short time and one that is successful.

Cash flow reporting is absolutely essential for any business that wants to grow, survive, or just not get in trouble with the tax office or ASIC.

If you’re thinking about whether you can afford to buy something for your business, how powerful would it be to know if you can afford it. Your answer could be “yes”, “no” or maybe “not just now” and know when you can. So many of the great business leaders say the same thing over and over again – cash is King! We believe they’re right, and it deserves to be managed.

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.” Peter F. Drucker

Day to Day

Busy business owners need advice when they need it – and no one knows exactly when that will be. From a Tax perspective, we encourage our clients to pick up the phone so we can discuss things before they happen – not afterwards when the cost of fixing it is high or it’s just too late.

The same is true for business advice. The value of having someone provide timely objective advice will outweigh the impact of not getting good advice every time. We make it easy to get the support you need.

We like to think of what we offer as an outsourced Chief Financial Officer (CFO) service. To learn more, take a look at our CFO page.

Financial Modelling

Sometimes, the decisions you face are complex. Financial modelling allows for multiple scenarios to be considered so that a decision based on information can be made. It can be complex and involved, but we love doing this and we really enjoy helping people make great decisions.

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

– from: Alice in Wonderland

Strategy

People often misunderstand what strategy means, and they often don’t think they need to worry about it. At its core, it really means that you have a direction and a purpose.

We once attended a conference where the consultants preached that businesses didn’t need to know where they were going as they could just “feel their way and be flexible”. Well… we agree a successful business needs to be flexible. However, the problem with taking this too far is that it would be like getting in the car, turning it on and wandering aimlessly knowing in the back of your mind you really needed to get some food at some stage.

When you have a strategy, everyone in your business can work with you to achieve it and you avoid wasting resources, time and money. You also get to enjoy what you’re doing. Wouldn’t that be great?

Planning

What’s the difference between strategy and planning I hear you ask? Well, strategy is working out where you want to go and what is acceptable and what isn’t in getting there.

Planning is about how you’re going to achieve it. It’s the difference between deciding to get married and organising it.

It still amazes me that people will spend countless hours on planning a wedding worth tens of thousands, but will not spend a tenth of that time planning their business which is worth many times the cost of the wedding.

The difference is obviously emotion but your business is important too. Planning your business doesn’t need to be as complicated as a wedding (or as stressful) but it can be as inspiring. It needs some time, some understanding and a good guide.

That’s where we can make a huge difference in helping you define and realise your goals.

“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it.” – Groucho Marx

Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet

Some years ago, we were asked by a networking group we were in to do a presentation on how to read a profit and loss report. It was a greatly rewarding experience and at the same time very enlightening. What we discovered was that like all people “in the business”, we had assumed that everyone knew what we knew.

We have refined the presentation quite a bit over the years and helping people to understand at a high level and even at a lower level, the things they can control and the power the reports offer is something we regard as important – and we enjoy doing it.

Whilst most people know what is in their profit and loss, extending the understanding to the balance sheet means that long term planning can also take place.

An Accountant is having a hard time sleeping and goes to see his Doctor. –

“Doctor, I just can’t get to sleep at night.”

“Have you tried counting sheep?”

“That’s the problem – I make a mistake and then spend three hours trying to find it.”

Advice on right entries

The choice of software that is available at the moment has never been greater. Everybody seems to be moving to cloud based systems and the choice of the right system depends on your needs.

To chose the right system, you need to ask a series of questions. These are some critical ones:

• Payroll? – Simple or complex. How many employees?
• Inventory? – how complex?
• Who is going to use it and when / where?
• Chart of Accounts – This is a crucial aspect that needs to be right at the outset. You will be living with this a long time.
• What is Historical Balancing? – if you see this… call for help. Most systems allow for this when you migrate over but honestly… it’s not OK.

Whilst the software has made it a little easier, we make sure you’re not only set up right, you also get the entries right. It’s not just bookkeeping, it’s knowing your Accounting rules regardless of the system used and it’s providing help when it’s needed.

To learn more about our Accounting and Bookkeeping services take a look at the Business Services Page.

Right Software

As Professional Partners, we can help you chose and then arrange for the right solution, and help you get started, or solve a problem you have. We support all accounting software and of course, you don’t have to pick any particular software. We can work with you to get in place a solution that works for you.

“If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” – Mario Andretti

Analysis

Your reports can give you a great overview of what happened, but it is important to have the right reports that help you make decisions. Your reporting should provide either information to help you make decisions, report an outcome or manage risks. If they’re not doing any of these then maybe it’s time you took a look at the reports you have. We often hear people say that they print out their profit and loss report every month but is that really analysis?

We can help you deep dive into your business and provide insights that can make all the difference.

Key Perforamce Indicators

This is an area we are really passionate about because it just makes so much positive difference. We hear people talk about Key Performance Indicators (KPI) a lot. First things first – if your indicator has a dollar sign in front of it, it is not a KPI. The activities you do, that lead to the outcomes you want – that’s what you’re looking for.

Looking at a page of indicators that you can manage, provides enormous benefits. The most important thing you have is your time and in business, everybody wants it.

If you know what to look for, you can focus your time on things that matter and if that’s not enough…. Focussing only on what matters, gives you back time and means that you can actually manage your business.

If the sound of being more focussed and effective sounds good, we’d love to hear from you.