Of GAAP Accounting Standards When Seeking Investment Capital

The Importance

There are several good reasons to use GAAP standards and to hire a bookkeeper who knows GAAP. If you're seeking investment capital to grow your business, your potential investors will want nothing less. Even if a virtual bookkeeper is managing your small business bookkeeping and financial accounting, we feel it's important for business owners to know the basics of what goes in to accurate accounting.

GAAP principles largely relate to the ways and the timeframes in which revenue and expenses are recorded, in order to assure an accurate picture of a company's current finances and financial future.

Anyone making financial projections based on cash flow statements, profit and loss statements and balance sheets is reasonably assured of accurate financial forecasting if the financial statements adhere to basic standards.

Use of BSC for Sales Strategies Evaluation

Success of every business depends on sales, be it products or services. Every commercial organization looks for as many customers as possible to make profits. However, the recent crisis has negatively affected purchasing power of customers in lots of countries. Thus, people do not have enough money to afford products and services they used to afford. Therefore, companies had to re-orient their businesses to offer clients exactly what they needed at the moment.

Every sales department has certain goals and plans (for instance, to sell 200K smartphones a month or attract 10K new customers). Yet, often sales goals do not fully comply with goals of other departments, and what's more important, goals of the entire company, its mission, vision and strategies. In other words, a sales department may fulfill its goals, but this will be not enough to succeed on a larger scale. For this reason, many organizations use performance evaluation and strategic management tools to measure performance of sales departments and align strategies designed for sales managers.

There are many popular strategic management frameworks these days, such as Kaizen or Six Sigma. Yet, Balanced Scorecard is known as the most user-friendly and easy to implement system for performance evaluation and strategy supervision. BSC was developed in early 1990s, but has received only minor updated and modifications since then. Its creators Norton and Kaplan had one basic idea when developing the concept - any strategic management framework should include non-financial indicators. This means that financial results of any organization with clear commercial goals largely depend on non financial factors, such as dedication of personnel, internal business processes etc. This is where Balanced Scorecard shows its true power.

7 Ways To Move People From Problem Think To Solution Think

I had dinner the other night with a business executive who was talking about the difficulties of managing her sales people. In fact, both she and they were having so many discussions about overwhelming workloads, undesirable territories, and intra-staff conflict that their daily business focus was tipping much more to conversations about internal issues than it was to focusing externally on their clients and making sales. As she was relating how she was managing her people through their issues, a few patterns emerged:

The focus was on the problems, or what they didn't want, versus on solutions or what they did want. The manager was trying to solve her staff's problems for them in the form of "have you tried this" rather than influencing her sales people to solve their own problems. The sales people were not taking responsibility for their own success-or failure.

What can this, or any, executive do to quickly change the situation so that the company's talent can re-balance its day to an external, client/customer focus:

Initiate a laser focused "in the hallways" type of coaching climate where direct, open ended questions designed to reach solutions replace discussions that linger in the quagmire of discontent.

Let someone sit in the juices of a problem only for a few minutes, not longer, before quickly moving them to "What do you want to happen/change?" questions.

Consistently ask questions that focus the employee on what they can control and how that control can affect change "What would have to happen for that not to be a problem? What can you stop doing today that will help you with feelings of being overwhelmed?

If you hit the inevitable roadblocks of "I don't know," or "I can't stop doing anything," use techniques to move them forward. "What more information do you need to know?" "Who can you hand off "X" project to so that you can focus on more important issues? " "What important assignment are you not doing or not giving enough attention to because you can't stop doing X?" "How does that hold back your advancement in the company?"

"How does it shortchange your clients?"

Insert the word "specifically" when asking questions. "What specifically would help you to know?" Asking someone to be specific influences the likelihood of their finding a solution.

How to Do Credit Control

Credit control gives the impression that it is a dark art surrounded in mystery. People think it's a hard task to undertake, they feel that the person on the other end of the telephone is going to be rude to them or they could ask questions that they simply don't have the answers to. However; the biggest fear appears to be the fact that; we can become very uncomfortable asking people for money. If a business has provided a product or service they are entitled to receive full recompense for that product or service.

Credit Control doesn't have to become an arduous endeavour, once you have momentum you will become an exceptional at credit control. Below are some suggestions on how to tackle credit control.

    Make sure you are clear of all distractions. This means that you are going to have to concentrate on one task at a time. That task has to be credit control.

Plan and Start to Outsource Bookkeeping Today

It is difficult to achieve your business vision alone. Assistance from like-minded and skilled people will certainly bring you closer to your long-term goals. Among those professionals is a bookkeeper who will keep your books regularly. In the past it was difficult to employ a worker who was completely independent. Today you can outsource bookkeeping to a few of the top US-based accounting firms. Outsourcing allows you to assign difficult, boring or urgent work to an independent expert.

People love to outsource bookkeeping work to avoid employing full-time employees. It is easier to delegate work to a self-governing company than to an individual bookkeeper who must use your office space and equipment. If you choose a reliable company, you will get more gains than losses. A decision to outsource bookkeeping is not easy for starters like you.

It is possible to fear sharing confidential financial data of your company with strangers. In addition, because your small business has limited finances, you might feel tempted to continue working alone.

Online Accounting Versus Destop Accounting

Every day, technology is changing the way we do business. This article is about desktop versus online accounting specifically QuickBooks Online. QuickBooks Online has a lot of positive characteristics and Intuit continues to improve all their product offerings; most of the functionality is the same. Online does have some additional features over the desktop and vice versa; however online is not necessarily for everyone. I personally find it is a matter of how you work, your budget and what your business needs are.

Pros:

• No need to wait for the next version to come out to get updates and to upgrade. Intuit updates the program approximately every four weeks.

• No need to backup separately; your work file is automatically backed up on their servers all the time.

• As long as you have access to the internet you and other users can access your books from anywhere in the world. However, you could still access your desktop version through online services such as Logmein.com and gotomypc.com.