Whether you own a small, one-person operation or are the leader of 100 employees or more, you have specific needs and goals for your business. It is wise to analyze current business conditions and discuss strategies with someone who understands your company’s finances. And what better partner to depend on than an advisory-certified CPA?
If you want to boost your business and improve your finances, it’s crucial to rely on an accountant who provides advisory services alongside their regular back office management or tax preparation services for your company.
Through financial and business-centered discussions with your CPA, you can benefit from:
Improved Cash Flow
Cash flow is one of the biggest concerns for small businesses, especially young ones. Maintaining a healthy, positive cash flow is vital to your company’s success, but sometimes, it can feel like a challenging endeavor or an impossible skill to master.
Bringing your cash flow concerns to your accountant allows you to spot problems or pinpoint areas to improve. Your advising accountant can help you analyze your current cash flow and give a third-party view of how your money moves through your business. They can better detect spending patterns or cash flow tendencies that are unnecessary or changeable.
By talking through your cash flow with your advisor, even if you’re not concerned about it, you can boost your margins, increase profitability, and maintain a healthy flow moving forward.
Clearer Finance and Performance Forecasting
It’s one thing to envision the future and use current conditions to predict what your business’s finances might look like. Having an unbiased CPA analyze and evaluate what they might look like in the future is another thing entirely.
When you perform business forecasting by yourself or even with an internal team at your company, you’ll evaluate your company’s current metrics and measurables as well as the current state of the economy and its predicted future. And while that sounds fairly neutral, albeit tedious, it is too easy to overlook certain figures or data points during the process. It’s even possible to allow big ideas or overly positive or negative thinking to skew the final results.
With a more neutral business advisor helping you forecast, you will benefit from thorough, honest forecasting that considers all angles of your business and your financial health.
Forecasting with an advisor by your side helps to mitigate uncertainty, overreactions, or underreactions by providing:
- Accurate insight into your business and where it is going to inform your next steps.
- Opportunities to talk through strategies to improve conditions and reach goals.
- Discussion of future payments or bills, such as tax bills, that allow for proper preparation.
A bonus is that your advisor can recommend changes, new processes to implement, and additional suggestions for your business to exceed forecasted expectations. When considering a strategy change, you can talk through possible risks, risk mitigation, best practices, dos and don’ts, and so much more to ensure any implementation goes as smoothly as possible.
A New or Fresh Perspective
When you establish a routine for your business, you start developing patterns everywhere. You might not realize it, but how you carry out your daily tasks and weekly operations becomes second nature to you. And if these patterns keep the lights on, doors open, and employees paid, why reevaluate and make changes?
While you might not think your ways of doing business need a second opinion, your accountant can still analyze your regular operations with fresh eyes and offer a different perspective on how your current system is either working in your favor or against you.
Your advisor may ask questions about how you manage your books to help spot holes in the process or unnecessary steps that could be wasting money or taking up too much of your valuable time. Your advisor can shed light and introduce better practices that usher in a positive, business-benefiting change to your processes.
Ready to change the way you view accounting? Talk to ClaytonCarter about our back office management and business advisory services.
Cristen Carter is a CPA and business advisor with over 30 years of experience serving clients in Georgia. When you want to simplify your processes and improve business performance, rely on accounting services and business advisory from our team. Contact ClaytonCarter’s office today: (478) 621-4145