A system is designed to create efficiencies and ease and, most importantly, predictable outcomes. People should not have to think through each step. Systems need to be living organisms, where people are empowered to modify the systems (with oversight) to create an environment of constant improvement. When your business creates an environment of problem-solving people…

I get frequently asked if cloud-based accounting is secure. My answer – “what has you think desktop computing is secure?” The answer I hear most often is something like this – “I want to control my own data; I don’t trust putting it online. What if someone hacks into it?” The other risk people fear…

As an accounting firm, we are surprisingly often in the midst of great change. And the biggest changes we go through with our clients are conversions. This is where we take a business on a legacy system and convert their accounting software, systems, and processes to cloud-based software. Also, in the dynamic world of real-time…

A lot of business people make the mistake of assuming their customers know the true value of their product or service. The truth is because we intimately know what we offer, we mistakenly just assume that our customers will just know that too! They don’t. So they need to be educated. How do you go…

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,…