Set up
We’ve done this hundreds of time and came make this painless often it just 2-6 hours. We can have your bank accounts linked, multiple user sign on accounts, your logo on the invoices, and a financial report that is laid out in an insightful manner. We’ll work with you for typically no more than 2 hours then take away any data entry projects to be entered off site and then present to you.
Financial Report layout
We’ve never seen a set of financials that couldn’t be laid out in a more effective manner. It’s critical that a Profit and Loss have a Cost of Goods section and that it focus on separating out and grouping categories in ways that are insightful on how you drive your business. For instance a restaurant would want to know what the cost of labor vs materials are to make sure their on track. A retailer needs to understand their percentage of overhead to correctly set prices.
Balance sheets are often far too neglected. The liability balances should be accurate at all times. Often payments on loans are not broken down into interest vs principal and must be attended too. Tricks like this save the accountant time on the back end as well.
Metric review
Understanding your costs ratios can only be of help to your business. If you now knew what your overhead rate (rent, utilities, fixed costs) was you’d have a clear percentage you could market up your goods with. If you understand that labor costs were typically under 35% in your industry you could compare yours and make the important decisions based on real metrics.
There are many ways to look at a profit and loss and we’ll explore all of them with you. From comparing each month, to simply adding a column for percentages you’ll now begin to learn that rent is 5% and labor is 33% while advertising is under 1%. We can integrate budgets as well and compare those side by side, checking to see if we’re hitting the targets.
Job Costing is all to often overlooked as well. Quickbooks has this great little field built right into every entry called either customer/class – there you can relate any purchase to the customers’ job. Then when its time to bill the customer you can grab those items and notes and put them right in the bill. As well you can cull a report showing your bill to them and then your cost of materials and labor.
We can provide historical tracking and charts as well. Often it’s nice to just simply plot the last few years Sales or Gross Profit right on a chart, if overlayed you can identify seasonality.
Entering Last Year at Tax Time
Have a scary box of receipts? No problem, we can take care of those for you. We’re experts at reading receipts and can typically tell at a glance what your buying is it gas, meals, are you at Hannaford buying paper towels for the office, whatever it is we know where to put it. Thanks to Google we know that weirdly named business in Boston was actually a restaurant, supplier, whatever the case.
When we’re backtracking we have some techniques such as trying to post off just the bank statements rather then flipping through a bevy of receipts. And if there’s any way to export transactions from your credit card company or bank we’ll try to do that as well. We’ll discuss several of those techniques in our first meeting.