Category: Best Practices

The Time of Reckoning – Closing the Books for 2011

Closing the books means you are ending your official accounting period so you can start the next period with a clean slate. It means that once the books are “closed” there will be no more changes to the financial documents for the closed period. So accuracy is critical. The closed books are the “gospel” of what has happened in the financials for your company.

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Strategies for Budgeting Success

Start by reviewing the numbers that show your actuals (from your P&L report), your forecast (based on where you think you can make adjustments), and the difference or variance for each line item. Now you have a working budget!

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Embrace The Joys of Budgeting!

It might make it easier (and more palatable) to think of budgeting as profit planning. If you have a profit plan in place, then you can truly track your income and expenses in a fashion that gives you a clear plan as to how to increase your revenues and where to cut your overhead.

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Recognizing the Symptoms of a Toxic Employee

And like any disease, a toxic employee can subtly spread counterproductive attitudes and actions to other employees. Employees who were productive but lacked the strength to overcome the negative forces become carriers of the disease, and so the toxicity spreads. Over time, the entire company can be infected.

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Why You Need to Make Systems the Foundation of Your Operation

What is it that prevents small businesses from successfully implementing useful back office systems? Usually it is the business owner. Small business owners often lack the knowledge, the time, and the help they need to create useful systems and make them work to their advantage. And a lot of business owners don’t think they need systems. That’s where they are mistaken.

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How to Create a Chain of Command in Business

The chain of command provides a clear line of responsibility from the executive suite on down. As part of the structure, you need to give employees a procedure to move up the chain if their concerns are not resolved.

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Do You Know the Difference Between a CPA and a CFO?

For moderately sized companies in the $2 million to $20 million range, senior management often turn to their CPA for advice about business finances because they don’t have a CFO or financial advisor on staff. What they will get from a CPA is a financial opinion informed by the CPA’s perspective on taxes and tax law, not necessarily the financial opinion that may be best for the situation.

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