As I have written in a prior Blog, a bad debt costs you much more than the actual bad debt. What do I mean? Well, it’s simple math. A bad debt of $12,000 becomes a fixed cost to your business that month. To recover that expense you need to generate more sales to recover. It…
I very often see a pattern that when businesses (or people) are doing great financially, they go wild in their spending. The economy is booming, and things are just popping – new customers are flowing, the market is up-up-up. Your industry is flourishing. (Think Vancouver real estate a few years ago!)… Then – pop –…
There is a word beginning with “F” that most business owners would rather just not talk about… It is…(cough-cough)…fraud. Could never happen to you, right? Actually it can, and it does happen to many more businesses than you think. And, there are two sad truths here: (1) that the “best” designed frauds are very hard…
I love technology when it creates efficiencies and scalability for work-flows. I am a bit of a road warrior in the sense that our business is 100% virtual, and I work from 4 different locations around the world – Salt Spring Island, downtown Vancouver, Naxos Island, Greece, and Kenya, Africa. My work station and tools…
The basic small business accounting packages on the marketplace today can do some pretty amazing things. The small business accounting packages like Xero and QuickBooks Online are at their best doing these core tasks: Accounts Receivable management Accounts Payable management Reporting Cash-flow Ok, so can’t QuickBooks Desktop or Sage do all those just fine? Yes,…
“Organize around business functions, not people. Build systems within each business function. Let systems run the business and people run the systems. People come and go but the systems remain constant.” – Michael Gerber
For millions of Christians worldwide this is Lent – a period of 40 days from Ash Wednesday, which started this past Wednesday, March 6th and ends on Thursday before Good Friday, April 18th. What is Lent and what the heck does this have to do with business? Keep reading and I will reveal to you…
Most businesses produce, minimally, a Balance Sheet and Income Statement… Beyond that, not a lot gets measured. And, how do you know exactly what to measure anyway? There are things you could measure that you would not want to measure or need to measure. As an example, in our business we don’t measure hours, even…
When a business gives credit to a customer, they run a risk. That risk is small or big depending on a number of critical things… There are a few mistakes that many businesses make when giving credit to their customers, and it costs them a lot. Mistake Number 1 – Giving Credit Where Credit is…
How many read that headline, and think, “nice dream, I’ve heard that so often for so long…the paperless office is here, blah, blah. And we seem to print more paper now than ever before!” It is true though, and we have the tools and the proof. The proof is our own business and most of…