Have You Made Your Accounting New Year’s Resolution?

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Making a New Year’s resolution is a great way to make changes, big and small, in your personal life. Whether it’s deciding to go to the gym or save more money, making a resolution and actually sticking with it can be transformative.

So why not make strategic resolutions for your business?

And unlike that resolution to win a marathon, these resolutions might be ones you can actually keep.

Make Processes More Efficient

Bill Gates is often quoted with his view on technology:

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Change is hard, and changing longstanding processes can be difficult. So maybe it’s best to start small and use the technology to help things along.

Modern software will allow for easy rules-setting to force behaviors, however small, to simplify processes. Having the accounting software nudge your processes in the right direction, even in the smallest of steps, can make your organization run smoothly.

Invest in Your Business

You can’t make a skyscraper without a good foundation.

So for the new year, setting a budget that includes leveraging the innovations in software – particularly cloud software – can pay huge dividends for your company.

Whether that means investing in a new customer relationship software or looking at add-on software to make your existing purchase better, options have never been better.

It starts with a mindset of looking at options and investing where the return makes sense.

Accounting DashboardMake Small Improvements… Often

Companies have a list of financial metrics at their disposal to weed out inefficiencies and fine-tune an organization. For example:

For a business with $25 million in sales that routinely takes 45 days to collect accounts receivable, shaving off 14 days can mean nearly $1 million more in the bank and off the books, even without increasing sales a dime.
— Forbes

Improving metrics like Days Sales Outstanding, among others, can mean the difference between good and great. Start with good reporting and dashboards to give visibility into those metrics, and make them available to those who can make the changes.

Best of luck for a wonderful new year!