Meeting with your accountant on a regular basis is vital to enable your business to grow.
At quarterly strategy meetings, your accountant should hold you to account to make sure you are meeting your business objectives and you understand the numbers.
The benefits of quarterly strategy meetings include:
• Discussing your SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). Reviewing your competitors to see what they are doing differently and what you need to change to compete.
• Reviewing your business plan to ensure you are still reaching your business goals – discussing what has changed within your business since you last wrote the plan.
• Industry analysis – reviewing this to ensure your target market is growing. If the market isn’t growing, you might want to look at diversification as this will help to identify new areas for growth.
• Reviewing and discussing the data contained in your accounts as this can provide useful insights enabling you to make the right decisions for your business.
• Reviewing your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) ensuring your business is performing at its best. Financial KPIs include: cash flow, gross profit margin, net profit margin, operational profit margin, revenue growth rate, liquidity ratio, creditor and debtor days. By tracking your KPIs, you know exactly how your business is performing enabling you to make adjustments as needed.
• Reviewing your processes and controls – how can you streamline your processes to make your business work more efficiently? Are you using the right technology for your business?
• Discussing your sales and marketing strategy – do you have a strategy in place to ensure you are marketing and selling your products or services as well as you can be?
• Reviewing your management and leadership team – do you have the right talent in place to take your business forward and ensure its success? Do you have the correct resources in place to meet your future business goals?
As proactive accountants and business advisers, we like to get to know and understand our clients and their business, ensuring we are by their side throughout their business journey.
If you require any advice, please do not hesitate to contact the team on 0161 761 5231 or email theteam@horsfield-smith.co.uk.
