Many business owners and executives fail to realize that accounting is the information connection within your own business. Accounting doesn’t simply capture the box scores of your company’s business transactions. A properly structured chart of accounts and supporting internal procedures ensure your company has immediate access to crucial internal controls and information in order to inform sound decisions in today’s fast-moving business environment.
It’s All Related – But The Accounting is the Backbone
What do your company’s numbers tell you? Do they provide immediate insight into your company’s challenges and opportunities? Business is a mastery of multiple processes such as supply, production, sales, customer services, human resource management, budgeting, market analysis, strategic planning, forecasting, and autopsy (as in, what actually happened, and why?).
Accounting is the information connection that documents how, when and where income, expenses and losses are realized and how these events can be structured to increase retained earnings and minimize the impact of taxation. Sure, your accounting system fills in the blanks of an income statement, balance sheet, statement of cash flows and other financial statements and reports. However, when properly structured your accounting system should also immediately flag potential business challenges and opportunities.
Decisions aren’t taken in a vacuum. If your present operations, procedures, and accounting systems aren’t capturing the details of your business effectively you are missing out on some of the most vital and insightful information with which to make timely and informed business decisions.
You can’t address a tax issue or consider the impact of expansion into new geographic markets without discussing the accounting strategies necessary to capture information at its source. Developing a tax strategy may be sound in and of itself but falls apart when it comes to implementation across the breadth of your business and the impact it might have upon your operations, sales and service departments, employees and suppliers.
When properly structured, internal accounting systems and informational dashboards provide accurate, detailed insight into all aspects of your business to inform sound decisions in today’s fast-paced business environment.
The Forest for the Trees…
Presently, most business owners and executive teams have separate professionals they rely upon for tax issues, legal services and dispute resolution, accounting, supply chain management, consulting and strategic planning. Each of these professionals looks at a problem, challenge or opportunity from the limitation of their own professional perspective. Therein lies the problem. Each professional is focused upon their own tree(s), while none of them perceives the totality of the forest and how to navigate over, around, under or through it.
Each professional has a piece of the puzzle. After decades of supporting local, national and international business clients I can tell you, the best solution lies in a blended balance of each. However, the client doesn’t have the legal, tax and accounting expertise to determine which part of each recommendation is best, let alone the process to integrate the solution and implement it into the daily operations of the business itself.
The interwoven nature of legal, tax and business analytics and decision making requires an integrated business service solution strategy. Accounting is the information connection that must be carefully and strategically charted, structured and implemented to capture not only the details of your business operations and transactions, but provide the up-to-the-minute crucial business information necessary to make sound, informed business decisions.
What do you see? Is the pace and scope of your business accelerating? Have you tapped into that internal resource of up-to-the-minute crucial business information?
The fruits of an integrated approach are substantial. The ability to accurately capture, interpret and act upon information is the edge necessary to not just survive in today’s competitive business climate, but to conquer it.
