Are you a victim of bad bookkeeping?

Perhaps you don’t have timely financials to review, your numbers aren’t tied up with a bow for your accountant or auditor, or maybe you’re staring down the barrel at thousands of uncategorized transactions, paralyzed with fear at how to begin.

It doesn’t matter how we got here, so let’s skip the blame game and just take a deep breath because there’s an easy way to get you to the other side.

And what does that other side look like?

Peace, calm, and ease when you’re looking at your cash flow forecast. Clarity and confidence when you’re making what used to feel like scary decisions. The grass truly is greener.

I’m taking you behind the scenes this month as we dive into closing the books for our own company! I sat down on Monday, May 4th for about one hour and did the following:

1. Open up our monthly close checklist. Yup, even though we do this every single month for dozens of clients, we always refer to the checklist to ensure we don’t forget a thing.
2. Download our bank statements.
3. Code all of our transactions in Quickbooks. We make sure every expense and income is coded accurately so we get super useful reports. Sometimes Quickbooks makes incorrect assumptions at where things should go and you’ll need to review and update.
4. Review income. We check out all of our outstanding invoices (Accounts Receivable Aging report) and make sure all of our incoming cash is matched up to the correct invoice and coded accurately.
5. Reconcile bank accounts. Quickbooks has a super easy-to-use function to compare your bank statements to your Quickbooks transactions and make sure it matches perfectly.
6. Run reports.  We always look at a comparative profit & loss statement, so we can quickly spot any differences (hopefully all GROWTH!) between this year and last year, plus a comparative balance sheet to check out asset (cash) growth.
7. Update our projections. We take a few moments to update our forecast with this month’s numbers then sit with the projections for a few minutes to think about what’s coming. If we added a new client or anticipate bringing on another team member or incurring a big expense, we update our projections accordingly.
8. Check-in with our goals and we’re done! I sometimes forget my big goals for the year (hey, I’ve got a lot going on!) so this is a perfect time to check back in on your strategic plan, make sure you’re on track, and change course if necessary.

So, you don’t have to be a victim to bad bookkeeping because it’s truly not a hard process. It just requires monthly focus and consistency. And on the other side is peace of mind, clarity, and confidence in your own leadership and financial management!