Assessing tool kit, resources key in small-business checklist for 2017
January is the start of a new fiscal year for many small-business owners, with new revenue targets, budgets and financial projections. It’s a good time to assess not only the financial health of your company, but also the tools and resources you’re using to run your accounting. Here’s a checklist of some things to pay attention to in order to make 2017 your best year yet.
Start with who’s managing your finances. Increasingly, companies such as Flip Accounting and ConnectCPA are launching to help small-business owners outsource their daily bookkeeping and financial planning. These can be more affordable than hiring accounting staff. Flip founders Matt Hicks and Mike MacDonald started the company to help small-business owners become more aware of their daily operations, and to help them move to cloud-based and app-based tools for their finances. Flip handles everything from payroll and employee expenses to invoicing and accounts receivable, to the larger financial modelling and budgets that are key to success.
“The transition of accounting and bookkeeping functions to the cloud has been to the benefit of the small-business owner,” says Hicks. “It’s not just your accounting system that’s in the cloud, it’s your entire accounting department. And it’s far more cost-effective than hiring in-house.”
ConnectCPA co-founder Mike Pinkus and his team helped That Clean Life founder Abigail Hopkins set up an online accounting system, figure out taxes for their online recipe and meal-planning platform, and go fully paperless.
“All our meetings are done via video conference, everything is signed via e-signature, all my receipts are captured on my phone ... and everything is secure in the cloud,” she says. ”
For entrepreneurs who have inhouse help, a January checklist should include brainstorming a list of expenses. Flip recommends breaking the list into four categories of fixed costs: operating budget (rent, insurance, supplies), capital budget (costs outlays for such major purchases as computers and company vehicles), payroll budget (wages, salaries, contributions to EI and CPP, benefits), and discretionary budget (the cost of running your business, but aren’t necessarily fixed, such as advertising or office snacks).
“Collectively, these budgets will help you figure out your monthly burn rate, which is the monthly amount it costs to run your business,” Hicks says. “Add up all your expenses and find the monthly rate, which will then help establish revenue targets.”
In addition, Hicks suggests setting a weekly calendar reminder to check cash positions — how much money is in the bank and how much is outstanding in accounts receivable.
Finally, if you manage finances in-house, overhaul your financial tool kit. Freshbooks and Wave offer such cloud-based tools as invoicing, payroll and expense-tracking solutions, and QuickBooks Online is a popular choice for small-business accounting software. Hicks also notes Receipt Bank is one of his favourite apps for employee reimbursements and receipt-tracking — snap a photo of a receipt, and an expense report is created automatically. For payroll, try an online tool such as Wagepoint, which makes pay runs easy and provides employees with access to pay stubs. Hicks recommends Plooto to avoid writing cheques and to send and receive payments electronically.
He often sees small-business owners repeat mistakes. They fail to create a budget or financial plan in the first place. Or if they do, they ignore that budget or plan, or don’t rework it as their business changes. They may even use the tax collected from customers as operating cash, and then find they may not have funds to pay the tax bill when it comes.