In my last post, I wrote about why it’s important to keep your business books clean. Accounting is one of those mundane details that most business owners don’t like to deal with. They would rather spend time building and selling their product or service. However, it is important to invest some time, attention, and money in keeping your books clean. This will allow you to make better decisions and help you avoid costly and distracting tax nightmares and clean-up projects.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that it’s important to invest in clean books.
Now where do you start? Unless you have an accounting background or lots of business experience, getting started may be intimidating.
The answer is to start by creating systems. Creating a system begins with defining roles that need to be filled and then building a team to fill those roles.
Before diving into accounting systems specifically, I want to talk about the importance of creating systems in all areas of your business.
In business and life, the key to creating order out of chaos is systems. Systems allow us to automate the mundane so we can focus our greatest efforts on fine tuning rather than cleaning up messes.
It doesn’t mean smart and skilled people aren’t required to carry out the system. It means these smart people don’t have to waste their brainpower trying to figure out the process each time. Instead, they can use their valuable mind to work on the business rather than in the business.
Those familiar with with The E-Myth will recognize the principle of working ON your business rather than IN your business. The author encourages business owners to look at a business like a system. That system needs various roles to be performed to operate smoothly. You start by defining what roles need to be filled and then plug people into those roles. The roles should be so well-defined that they can be performed by almost anyone (within the parameters of certain skills sets).
No role should be completely dependent on a specific person. People should be interchangeable. This may sound cold, but the reality is people come and go. Turnover is always somewhat disruptive, but having well-defined roles and systems will minimize the disruption.
Hopefully I’ve convinced you that you should create systems in all areas of your business, including accounting.
In my next post I will get into more detail about how to create accounting systems specifically.
Question: How have systems helped your business?