As summer approaches, preparing your business for growth is much like gearing up for a road trip. Just as you ensure your car is equipped with gas, oil, and properly inflated tires, your business needs all the right things to thrive. Let’s explore the essential financial tools that will serve as your business’s GPS, ensuring a smooth ride to profitability.
Navigating with Financial Insights
Before embarking on any journey, we gather insights beyond what’s visible on the dashboard of the car. Similarly, your business needs a clear destination and route, with awareness of potential roadblocks. Utilize tools like Profit First and Cash Flow Forecasting as your business GPS, providing direction and real-time insights.
Understanding Your Current Position
Begin by assessing your business’s current state and historical trends through financial statements like Profit and Loss and Balance Sheets. Key metrics such as Gross Margin, Media Efficiency Ratio, and Net Margin reveal crucial insights. Visual representations, like bookskeep’s personalized SmartStatements, make trend-spotting easier.
Profit First Leads the Way
Profit First acts as a benchmarking tool to ensure profitability. You can use this to determine your direction and end destination. By subtracting Cost of Goods Sold from gross sales, you determine Real Revenue—a vital metric for sustainable growth. Using your Real Revenue number and the chart below, compare your business and see how you’re doing.
Assess if you’re adequately compensating yourself and setting aside funds for taxes and operating expenses to avoid potential debt pitfalls. If you aren’t, you have a good chance of hitting that financial pothole of debt which can flatten your tires in a hurry. Our free Profit First Quick Start Guide can help you patch up and keep moving.
Know the Road Ahead with Forecasting
Previously reserved for larger enterprises, Cash Flow Forecasting is now accessible to businesses of all sizes. Tools like Fathom, a bookskeep favorite that we use to create the statements shown above, integrate with accounting software and allow you to project scenarios and plan strategically. For tighter financial management, we use granular forecasting spreadsheets to navigate weekly challenges and ensure long-term stability.
Empowering Financial Journey
While financial journeys vary, the key is in using the right tools and forward-thinking strategies. Understanding your destination and leveraging financial systems will not only ensure profitability but also make the journey enjoyable and rewarding.
Prepare your business for success this summer and beyond! To explore these tools further, check out Cyndi’s Financial Road Trip presentation or reach out to the bookskeep team to start forecasting for a brighter financial future today!
If your ecommerce business isn’t where you’d like it to be in terms of profitability, check out my book, Profit First for Ecommerce Sellers. It answers important questions about how to implement Profit First in an ecommerce business. Take control of your money and your business, and put Profit First to work for you!
You can also sign up for the Profit First for Ecommerce Sellers Online Course. As a Mastery Level, Certified Profit First Professional, I will teach you why Profit First works so well for ecommerce businesses and the particular challenges for businesses that have physical products requiring inventory management. You will learn how your behavior drives your money management habits for your business and how you can set up your business bank accounts to work with your habits.
Check out all our ecommerce accounting and profit advising services here!
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