Management accounts

Keeping you focused on the areas that drive your business forward

Annual accounts produced several months after the year end are fine for giving an overview of how your business is doing and helping to quantify your tax liabilities. However, they do little to help you make key decisions from one month to the next. To do that, you need regular, accurate and timely information.

Financial Information

A well-prepared set of management accounts will provide you with much of the information that you need to make key decisions. We have developed an extensive management reporting system that allows us to provide you with detailed management information, quickly and efficiently.

The management accounts that we produce can be monthly or quarterly. We can tailor them to your individual needs. However, they would typically include schedules showing:

• The profit or loss for the period, and for the year to date.
  
• A month-by-month or quarter-by-quarter review of income and expenses.
  
• Comparisons between the period and year-to-date results and any budgeted results.
  
• The balance sheet as at the period end.
  
• Key ratios for the period and year to date.
  
• Graphs showing the monthly or quarterly movements on key areas, such as turnover, gross and net profits, bank balances, debtors and creditors.

Non-financial Information

Of course, not all of the key information that you use to make business decisions will be financial information. Indeed, research shows that approximately 60% of the information used in decision-making is of a non-financial nature. If you want to make informed decisions, it is important that this non-financial information is as reliable as your financial information.

So what type of information might we be talking about? Examples of non-financial information include:

• customer and staff satisfaction levels;
  
• product quality;
  
• staff turnover;
  
• market research and responses to specific marketing campaigns;
  
• hits to your web site, or to specific articles on your site.

If you believe that one or more of these issues is critical to achieving your business goals, then you need to set up a system for tracking that issue. As Peter Drucker said decades ago:

“If you want results, measure it. If you don’t measure it, forget it.”

We can help ensure that you have the financial information that you need to make informed business decisions. We can also work with you to identify the key non-financial factors that make your business successful, and design and implement a system for tracking and reporting those factors.

Don’t just forget it - measure it!