If there is one thing that would have saved me a lot of headaches when I did my first month end reporting years ago, that would have been a “system” to identify the areas that I needed to monitor on my financial reports and a system to do so. I found myself in a position quite often when something came back to “bite” me that I could have prevented if only I knew how to check and manage it before it became a problem.

Most Managers and entrepreneurs (that are not accountants or have a degree in financing) learn the tricks of the trade as time goes by and become quite good at managing their expenses especially. If you should ask them how the business performed in the last month/quarter or year, they can tell you from the top of their heads what their turnover was for the period and probably how they kept expenses down. But there is much more to managing your business as a whole and understanding your financial reports than sales and expense management.

I am an advocate of systems and doing an exercise of “what went well and what went wrong” at the end of any project or financial month end. I call it “My post mortem”, it helps me to stay focused and analyse various results. Having such a system can help you with the designing of your Best Operating Procedures and also teach you what not to do again if things went wrong. If used correctly, you can even use such a system to train your staff.

After a project, the post mortem looks a bit different than that of your monthly results, as you can easily just work on a few questions and use the information for future projects. The most effective questions after a project could be zapped on an Excel worksheet and would include headings (especially if there was a lot of areas to evaluate) like:

What happened (I suggest you start with what went wrong first and work your way to what went well later on the sheet)

What was the cause of this happening?

What was the result of the mistake?

How did we fix it (what did we do this time)?

How could we prevent it from happening in the future?

What systems and processes needs to be put in place to support the process in the future?

When you manage your financials, these questions do apply to certain criteria but overall, they won’t get to the root of the problem and you will miss a lot of information that is vital for your business’ healthy financial status. Because of that, it is best to have a proper checklist to see if you have managed and monitor all the areas that you should be managing.

Here is a Checklist for you to use as a tool of what to look for in the financials or to ensure that you stay focussed and look at your financial results overall. Checklists works for everybody; it makes it easier to tick tasks off the To Do list and formulize a plan for the near future. It is a great management tool and would make your life a lot simpler.

Download the FREE PDF Checklist now and see how it works for you.

If you need more information on all the areas that you have to monitor, feel free to book a complimentary session with me and I will gladly assist.

Antoinette Venter, ActionCOACH Business Coach
antoinetteventer.actioncoach.com | antoinetteventer@actioncoach.com