Every business owner wants to know how their business is doing, and the typical scorecard for performance is the monthly financial reporting package put together by the accounting department. However, if your scorecard is slow to arrive, then you are handcuffed and can’t react quickly to troubling trends or other problems that you might discover when reviewing your financial statements. Here are five easy things you can do to help shorten your monthly closing cycle from weeks to days.
These are just five quick things that you can do to help simplify and speed up your monthly closing cycle, but there are many others to consider that are more complex and require more planning. You might want to stop using calendar months and switch to a 4-4-5 schedule, or perhaps thirteen 4-week periods, both of which end each accounting period on the same day of the week, usually a Saturday. Making this change, however, requires IRS approval. You might also consider changing your payroll frequency to line up more closely with your accounting periods. A financial professional can help you to analyze and implement all of these options.
Founded in 2001, FocusCFO is the leading onsite fractional CFO services provider in the Midwest and Southeast, with more than 100 CFOs and Area Presidents throughout Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina Pennsylvania, South Carolina, West Virginia and Tennessee. FocusCFO works closely with small to medium sized businesses helping business owners gain control over three key financial and operational areas: increasing cash flow, reducing business risk, and creating a platform for scalable growth. This allows business owners to then realize full financial control and increased value in their businesses.
For more information, visit us at focuscfo.com or follow us on LinkedIn.
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