Being a manager for a small business can sometimes feel like you are sitting in the captain's chair. Holding everyone accountable in your small business can have some adverse results if handled incorrectly. Will your ship crash if you take your hands off the controls? Being bookkeepers, we get to see a lot of different businesses practices from working on such a wide variety of industries. The reoccurring theme we usually see from both our clients and from our own books is holding everyone accountable. I'm talking yourself, employees, vendors, and sometimes your customers. With these areas held to the highest standards, you are really setting yourself up for success. You are able to accurately grow, obtain short term and long term goals, and predict the future for your business.
Holding Vendors Accountable
As a bookkeeper, I usually contact vendors to either work out an incorrect account balance or if I'm having issues with their service or product. You pay your vendors a decent amount of money, so why not use them if you have questions about their account balance. If a statement arrives and it doesn't line up with your balance in QuickBooks, give a call and get it ironed out immediately. To me, this is a no brainer, but some people have a tough time doing this for some reason. If you don't have time for it or think it's a hassle, you may want to consider outsourcing your bookkeeping. We enjoy it and are good at it.
Most businesses use a Point of Sale system that is unique to their industry. These systems come with annual service contracts that carry a hefty price tag. If you are paying a large annual fee, you should use their customer service to make sure you are using the program efficiently and aren't wasting time trying to figure things out. I've found that the customer service with Point of Sale systems is top notch. Are you in the restaurant industry and have a tough time keeping track of daily sales? Maybe you should reach out to Aloha; they offer a great product and have great customer service. If you are in the hospitality industry and having a tough time keeping track of your reservations or guest balances, you might want to work with Resort Data Processing. There is a chance your business might not need an additional Point of Sale besides QuickBooks. If you are running into issues with QuickBooks consider our QuickBooks consulting services. We are QuickBooks Pro Advisors and have unlimited access to a wide variety of resources to fix your bookkeeping problems.
Holding Employees Accountable
In order to successfully grow, you need to know how your employees are utilizing their time. Both a fully interactive calendar and time tracking doc will produce some cool end results. Having employees track their time will allow for evaluation of time wasted, time well spent, and areas that need attention. We track our time down to the last minute. Is a certain client taking time away from others and cutting into other operations? Does all that networking pay off? How much time is everyone spending on blogging? All these questions are easily answered if time is tracked to the last minute.
If you are trying to grow and use your company's time efficiently, you will want to have easy access to everyone's calendar. If I'm ever tied up and can't make a meeting, I have the ability to check to see when and where my colleagues will be and I can have them step in. Pretty easy concept, but some business feel this is too complicated to set up. These few 'easy' ideas really add up to very productive system for you and your business.
Once dialed out, you can then utilize historical data to accurately predict growth, and to set realistic goals for both the short term and long term. Want to improve your businesses systems for accountability and set some revenue goals for the upcoming year? Feel free to get in touch with us.
