How to enlist your bookkeeper in helping you track your goals
A three-step process for your bookkeeper to help you track your business goals.
Pursuing your goals alone has many challenges, so you want other people helping you. Even a second set of eyes looking out for your best interest can make a big difference.
What Bookkeepers Look For
Bookkeepers are trained to look for very specific things: whether the books are balanced, categorizing things so every transaction is easy to understand, reconciling your bank statements with your accounting system so your map matches the territory of dollars and cents. They can also look for other things, too, but won’t unless you know what kind of tracking you’re looking for. This isn’t necessarily because of laziness. It’s because bookkeepers are busy and they need to serve multiple businesses to make a living. As long as they are doing what they think you’re paying them for, and the money keeps coming in, there’s no problem from their perspective. It’s not much different with an in-house bookkeeper as well, though there might be more intra-office drama.
Good bookkeepers, however, like to know that what they are providing you is exactly what you need and use in your decisions.
Here is what you need to do so your bookkeeper is a more useful asset:
- Know what your own goals are. Best case scenario, if you don’t know your own goals, your bookkeeper will imagine what they are. However, if you know your goals, you can communicate them.
- Know what Key Performance Indicators Can Help You – Sales per channel for online stores, sales per service for service-based businesses, sales per product line or square foot in retail. These are just one KPI for each common type of small business. Things like accounts receivable turnover rate, costs as a percentage of each item sold, shrink rate for inventory. All of these are crucial.
- Communicate what key performance indicators you need from your bookkeeper and how often to expect them. Once a month is a good place to start. Then, when presenting monthly reports with P&L, Balance sheet, etc, your KPIs can also be presented.
- (BONUS) Take the information, and share it with the people in your organization responsible for creating those results. Make a goal for that KPI and share it with them, considering their suggestions on how to reach it.
Remember, good records are not just for taxes and budgeting; good records are for actionable information.
Schedule a call with me to talk about your business goals. We can even discuss some KPIs you want tracked. If you don’t know what to track, if I can’t think of anything, I can do some research for your business and come back with a few recommendations. As your bookkeeper, I can save you 80+ hours a year compared to doing it yourself. That’s plenty of time to improve on the results you want.