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Navigate With 360-Degree Vision

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Key Points

Effective business growth requires both accurate bookkeeping (looking back) and strategic forecasting (looking forward), with insights from past performance to inform future decisions.

Larger companies often separate accounting and finance teams, while smaller businesses may struggle by assigning both roles to one person, leading to inefficiencies.

A proactive, skilled approach to bookkeeping is essential for growth, and outsourcing to experienced professionals can provide both accurate financial tracking and strategic guidance for SMBs.

The leader of a growing company needs eyes in both the front and back of their head. They must look forward to project cash burn and capital needs to support their growth. But solid financial projections require assumptions rooted in past performance data — sales growth, profit margins, fixed vs variable costs, cash flow, and other key performance indicators (KPIs).

The fact is, you can't do a good job of planning for the future (forecasting) without timely, accurate, and thoughtful scorekeeping (bookkeeping) to give you clear insights about the past.

Looking Forward and Looking Back

Scorekeeping and forecasting each call for different sets of skills. In some larger companies, they're even organized as separate teams: an accounting team that keeps score and a finance team that analyzes results and forecasts ahead.

Smaller companies with limited resources often attempt to assign these roles to one person — who may not have both skillsets — possibly a bookkeeper, an office admin, or even the business owner. These businesses may find themselves scrambling to sort out year-end filings during a critical time when they should be planning for next year. Or that they're too busy keeping score to plan for and execute on growth at all.

Seeing What's Right in Front of You

Even bookkeeping that's good enough to avoid mistakes and hit all the filing deadlines isn't necessarily good enough to support your long-range plans. Growing your business requires a proactive approach.

The best bookkeepers don't just follow accounting conventions. They're also sharp and experienced enough to understand how their work product will be used to manage the business ahead. In addition, they can capture and report on the company's data in a way that supports strategic analysis and drives confident decision-making.

If you aren't getting what you need from your current bookkeeping and finance solution, you should take a look at outsourcing.

At SPRCHRGR, we perform the looking-back functions while also looking forward. Because we have experienced bookkeeping professionals and also seasoned finance leaders on staff, our dedicated team of experts provides both enterprise-level bookkeeping and finance services to transform the way SMBs operate and position them for optimized growth. Plus, we steer clients away from the navigational hazards that can run a small business aground — to facilitate smooth sailing from startup all the way through ramp-up.

Isn't that what you pictured when you launched your business in the first place?

Disclaimer: This article, podcast, or video is for general education and does not create a client relationship or service engagement between you and SPRCHRGR. Please contact your advisor for guidance on your specific situation. We may provide links to third-party sources for your convenience, but SPRCHRGR does not continually review, control, or monitor these websites and is not responsible for your business dealings with them.