You might be surprised to know that most small business owners don’t know as much about their business as they think they do. This provides a real opportunity for a qualified bookkeeper or acccountant because without a comprehensive understanding of the financial health of the business, the business owner is unable to make the informed decisions that are required to keep his business healthy and growing.

Successful business owners and department managers know what’s going on inside the business, but there are many businesses that don’t. Without a sense of the financial figures, their ability to make good decisons is cripled. Since many business owners don’t have a complete sense of the numbers, they either need to acquire that understanding or hire someone that they can trust to look at the numbers and interpret them in their behalf.

A Skilled Bookkeeper Can Provide This Expertise

Since you’re here, reading this newsletter, I think we can all agree that a qualified bookkeeper or accountant is the answer for many of these businesses. Of course, like anyone, the business owner may not be willing to admit that he doesn’t understand what all the numbers mean and what the implicaitons of the numbers are. (And it doesn’t serve anyone to point a finger and say, “You don’t know what your business is doing.” So we aren’t going to do that. )

However, as you meet with your clients and potential clients, it’s important that you have a complete understanding of their understanding. Allen Bostrom, in his book In the Black:Nine Principles to Make Your Business Profitable, offers a list of 13 questions that will enable both you and your client to understand (in a non-judgemental way) what’s going on inside the business. I’ve attached a Microsoft Word document that you can download and go over with your clients and prospective clients.

Click here to download the list.

The questions on this list are not meant to be all-inclusive, but will give you a baseline to start from. As you go over the questions on the list, it should become apparent that this information is important enough to hire a professional to help collect and interpret the information on a monthly basis. Feel free to use this document as you meet with your clients or as a thumbnail of the figures that you will need to put together for your clients each month.

For Your Clients to be Profitable, the Numbers Need to be the Right Numbers, Done the Right Way at the Right Time

As you do the bookkeeping and accounting each month you’ll have access to all the information that will help your customers make the kind of intelligent and informed decisions that make a business profitable.

It’s important that your clients communicate the results of this anyalyses to all of their employees to make sure that everyone in the business knows where it’s going and how well it’s progressing. When employees know what is being measured, it seems to improve.

The Tools to Make the Proper Financial Analyses are at Universal Accounting

Having a solid understanding of the Accounting and Bookkeeping methods and procedures is a great first step in learning the concepts behind Financial Business Analysis. You will learn to do books for small to mid-sized companies and how to analyze the books to prepare reports. You will learn to interpret reports so that you can advise your clients how to reduce costs and to better understand their financial standing and profitability. Your clients will look to you as an invaluable source of information about the financial health of their organization.