Start the New Year off Right with a Financial Plan
Let’s plan for growth.
The beginning of the year is an excellent time to focus on your business’s financials. It’s important to reflect on the past year and set goals, strategies, and action plans for the upcoming one.
Analyzing financial reports, creating effective marketing schedules, collecting receivable payments, assessing employee engagement levels, and planning ahead for infrastructure needs can help ensure that your business is successful.
Let’s take a closer look at what should be done when it comes to finances before you launch into the new year.
Analyzing Financial Reports
Before you can move forward, it’s important to get a clear picture of where you stand now. To do this, you need to analyze your financial reports from last year. This includes looking at items such as income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements, budgeting & forecasting data and more.
Each report should contain information regarding your current assets and liabilities as well as an overview of how much money was spent versus how much money was earned during the previous year. Pay special attention to any discrepancies or differences between what was expected versus what actually happened in terms of profits and expenses so that you can learn from them for the future.
A company's financial reports are a vital source of information when it comes to assessing the business's well-being.
Companies should prioritize accounting and bookkeeping in order to acquire accurate data from their financial records. With an understanding of these reports, Virtual CFOs can act as advisors and make recommendations on where the company needs improvement. With regular monitoring and consistent analysis, companies can gain valuable insight into their financial performance and set goals for future growth.
What is a virtual CFO?
Virtual CFO provides businesses with financial support that was previously unavailable. Small businesses who employ virtual CFOs receive access to expert financial professionals for less than a full-time CFO costs. Usually, the services of the virtual CFO are different in each company, however.
Our Virtual CFO services provide you with the experienced strategic support you need, at an affordable fixed cost. As your expert virtual CFO team, our experienced operational CFOs work with you to fine-tune your financial strategy to maximize shareholder value, accelerate growth, and achieve your growth & profit goals.
We work to understand your objectives, then provide fractional or interim virtual CFO services to help with strategic decisions, as well as optimizing and leading operational support.
A virtual CFO is an affordable alternative to hiring a full-time CFO and can make a big difference to a small business, by creating budgets and forecasts, pinpointing problem spending by highlighting trends in the market, validating or discouraging business decisions with financial well-being in mind. These are abilities that the vast majority of business owners don't possess or have time to implement.
Accounting and bookkeeping are essential elements of every business, especially at the start of a new year. It's important to settle all accounts and collect all receivables in order to begin the year with a clean slate.
Accurate books means stress free tax time
Best accounting software for small businesses
All business owners should have a software program to eliminate manual input. Accounting software for businesses is used for obtaining financial details quickly. The system helps with financial statements, income estimates and costs forecasts, tax liability forecasts, and more. When you have connected your business account with a software, your transactions will appear in a queue and are organized into various types. The details are on your account chart. Once a category has been approved, transactions will immediately be recorded on the consolidated accounts of the bank. The features of account software include:
QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks is an online accounting tool that helps businesses manage financial transactions. You may use the tool for storing receipts for expenses or tracking income and expenses. QuickBooks lists all your expenses, including the cost of inventory maintenance and sales. In addition it provides inventory automation through permanent inventory tracking, which ensures you keep updated sales and inventory costs when you sell something you want. QuickBooks can even be integrated with shopping software for keeping track of your business and finances.
Waves
Wave provides an online accounting software for small business. In the banking system, the bank can link your PayPal account or bank account to get the full details of a business's operations. It is also possible to generate a variety of accounts including accounts receivable and balance sheets.
Xero
Xero's Accounting platform has been created specifically for small businesses. Get in touch for information about your finances. It's accessible through almost all computers. Plus Xero offers advanced accounting functions that allow users to view their financial transactions from anywhere.
Get in contact with someone who understands your company. They will update your current financial information and maintain your books in a timely manner.
Virtual CFO Services
Our experienced operational financial management team helps you refine & optimize your business strategy. Our team is comprised of experienced virtual CFOs with extensive industry experience.
CFO Advisory Services can offer helpful insights into best accounting practices and aid businesses in assessing their accounting procedures at the end of each year so that they have a solid base to build upon come January 1st. With accounting being such an integral part of success, it's essential to put in place accounting measures that will give clarity and guidance when reviewing the prior year's financial data.
Advantages for small businesses
Having virtual CFOs is an essential advantage. Some of these can't find full-time CFOs. They could never consider a job. This is an issue because there are some small enterprises who fail within 3 or 4 years. The reason for the lack of differentiation is an ill-equipped business model. The virtual CFO will be able to keep the financial goals and reality clear. A virtual financial analyst (VMF) can make a significant difference for a small business.
Why are virtual CFO roles becoming more common?
The growth of virtual CFO services in the accounting sector has prompted firms to increase their service offerings. Basic services like auditing, financial reporting and accounting are a few. However, they should remain the only package your business can give your customers. In addition, successful businesses can increase revenue by providing financial advice, analysis and other services which influence the success of a business.
How to find the best virtual bookkeeping service for your business?
Virtual bookkeeping services have been gaining popularity in the small-business accounting field so far as bookkeeper trips to the office are becoming more the norm. Actually it would be impossible to meet my clients personally. It's hard to trust a virtual book service and even harder choosing which services to choose from. To assist you in your decision making and give you the best information I can give, we will demonstrate the process and explain why it's important to choose a good online bookkeeper.
Virtual Bookkeeping Services for 2023
Virtual bookkeeping services enable a highly efficient way of outsourcing such important work. We have found that using virtual bookkeeping services is more cost effective than employing the services of an internal bookkeeping company. Virtual services combine automated software with professional bookkeeping. Virtual books are essential to your business. Over the past few years we have compared thousands of different virtual bookkeeping software solutions that can work in your company.
What is virtual bookkeeping?
Virtual bookkeeping provides the ability to keep records from anywhere. This simple method of monitoring revenue and expenditures can help companies improve profit. A bookkeeper helps organizations understand the full picture of the finances, and understand how to spend the funds. When people talk about bookkeeping, they often refer to a web bookkeeping service. The outsourcing contractor will help you manage the individual accounts, file taxes, prepare your financial statements and many more services. Virtual Bookkeeping provides a way for a business owner to concentrate solely on managing their own business.
How virtual bookkeeping works?
When companies hire virtual bookkeepers they allow a bookkeeper (you!) remote control over their bookkeeping software and financial records. You're allowed to login and read the files at your desk as if you were in the office of the employee. How do we manage our remote business using cloud technologies? But what is the difference between managing your own business and being a virtual bookkeeper? Generally, some customers want you to take care primarily of billing and payroll.
Setting Goals, Strategies & Action Plans for the New Year
Once you have a good understanding of where you stand financially right now, it's time to start setting goals for yourself. Think about what areas of your business could use improvement and then determine steps that will help you reach those goals over the course of the next 12 months. This might include things like increasing sales by 10%, lowering costs by 15%, or expanding operations into new markets or countries. Once you have these goals in place, create strategies that will help support them as well as action plans outlining specific steps that need to be taken toward reaching each goal.
When planning for expected growth and projecting future needs, businesses need to begin by looking at the infrastructure they will need to become successful. This is not a one-size-fits-all process and requires accounting, bookkeeping, and CFO advisory services to ensure every business has the right tools in place.
As businesses grow and expand, so too must their accounting systems. Planning ahead by considering the duties necessary to manage accounting and bookkeeping systems is essential to ensure the accuracy of future financial documents and reports.
Furthermore, accounting experts can assist in developing better processes for forecasting future results as well as providing CFO advisory services that give management guidance for improving operations. Companies with properly planned accounting frameworks are better prepared for expected market changes and can seize new opportunities more quickly.
Developing Marketing Schedules & Planning Ahead for Infrastructure Needs
Now that you know where your business stands financially and have set some big-picture goals for yourself moving forward it's time to start thinking about marketing and planning ahead for infrastructure needs such as employee recruitment & retention or investments in technology or equipment upgrades necessary for growth.
When creating marketing schedules consider factors such as seasonal trends in consumer spending habits as well as how much impact each campaign is likely to have on sales given its cost & resources invested into it. Also plan ahead in terms of employee recruitment & retention especially if there are certain processes that require multiple people working together simultaneously or if there are skill sets needed which may not already be available in house but must be hired externally.
Finally, make sure to plan ahead in terms of investing in technology & equipment upgrades necessary for continued growth so that those expenses don't catch businesses off guard down the line once they've already been committed to making certain strategic decisions.
Taking the time at the start of each year to analyze financial reports, collect receivable payments, set goals, plan ahead, create effective marketing schedules, assess employee engagement levels, and invest in technology & equipment upgrades necessary is essential for any business hoping to succeed throughout the year.
By doing these tasks , businesses can ensure they are making smart decisions based on accurate data while still being flexible enough to adjust their strategies should circumstances change unexpectedly throughout the course of this coming year.
For businesses looking to make the most of the upcoming year, accounting, bookkeeping, and CFO advisory services can play a major role in helping a company set and achieve their goals.
With the right accounting partner, companies can rest assured that their books and accounting functions are being monitored closely and efficiently to ensure robustness for the future.
Regardless of what goals you have for your company this year, accounting solutions can provide invaluable assistance in making sure those aims are achieved.
