The Commerce Sync team was thrilled to attend QuickBooks Connect Local in beautiful Boulder, Colorado a few weeks ago. It was great to see local business owners come together to learn, network and be inspired. There was a wealth of great information for entrepreneurs and we wanted to share the following tips for obtaining optimal financial fitness thanks to a presentation by QuickBooks and Square.

get organized

A key to managing your expenses is to simplify how you spend your money. Dedicating one card for business expenses can help streamline your reconciliation process and make it easier to keep track of spending. In addition, automating recurring expenses is a great way to save time each month and can help take items off your to-do list.

Saving your receipts electronically is a way to make sure information is at your fingertips when you need it. Another good practice is to look at your bank’s free analysis tools each month to see how your income and expenses are trending. This can give you some great insight into cutting costs or finding additional revenue opportunities.

track income effectively

A huge part of running a successful business is to collect payments in a timely manner. Getting paid electronically whenever possible is the easiest and fastest way to make sure you maintain a positive cash flow. There are businesses that still need to accept checks – for those that do, it might be worth looking into getting a lock-box service where you bank so checks are sent directly to the bank. The advantages to this are real-time income (the checks are deposited as soon as they are received) and access to more granular data (checks are deposited individually instead of as a lump sum, which happens when you hold a group of checks and deposit them all at once).

data driven insights

Along with the flurry of activities that go along with being a small business owner, a very important aspect of running a successful business is to always know what’s going on financially. Easy ways to accomplish this include:

  • Setting up alerts: these will tell you if something out of the ordinary happens with your account
  • Identifying key performance indicators: pick three to five metrics that you track each month. This will help you make sure your finances are healthy.
  • Creating reports that deliver value for you. With the abundance of information available, it’s important to pick only what provides value to your business so you’re not stuck with data overload.

By keeping a pulse on your business finances, you will not only gain peace of mind, but you’ll be able to make decisions quickly and with confidence. One of the ways that Commerce Sync can help is by automatically transferring daily sales information from your Point of Sale (POS) or online storefront into your accounting software. On average, we save our small business clients over 300 hours a year (equal to $15,000). Interested? Learn more.