What Information Do We Need to Ensure the Business is Successful?

If you are going to be successful in managing your business, you need measurement. You need facts that tell you how well you are doing and where you need to improve. And those measures of success are much broader than just financial measures, such as profit, cash, margins, etc, however important they are.

How do you make sure that your business is heading in the right direction? How do you make sure that your strategies are working? How can you even tell if your strategies are being implemented effectively? Is profit the only measure of success? Does profit tell you anything about whether you are achieving your vision?

Let's say my vision was to become number 1 in a particular market. How would I know how close I was to achieving that? Not by looking at my profit in isolation. And just asking that question leads to other useful questions that clarify what I am aiming at. For instance, what does becoming number 1 mean? Number 1 for sales volume, turnover, profitability, customer satisfaction? Best company to work for? Most environmentally friendly company in the market? Another question would be, who are my competitors? How do I measure their position or performance? How can I get reliable information about them that will tell me whether I am number 1 or not?

And I should also have strategies to follow that will help me to achieve the vision. So, in this example, I may decide that I am going to offer the best prices in the market in order to win market share. Nothing in my financial statements will tell me whether I am offering the best prices in the market, or whether I am winning market share. And yet if I have set that strategy to achieve my vision, it will be critically important to measure whether it is succeeding.

Other things are also important to measure, things that you need to be doing well in to achieve your vision and succeed in your strategies. For example, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, risk/compliance and corporate social responsibility.

I think my point is made by now, though it may sound strange for a finance guy to say that financial performance is not everything! The point is that even if profits and cash are ultimately what you want to maximize, you have to measure other things that help you get there.

The classic way of doing this is by using a Balanced Business Scorecard. We have not got the space to go into the theory and talk about Kaplan and Norton, who invented the concept. The point I want to get across is that if you want to measure the performance and the success of your business, you have to measure a balanced range of aspects. And you have to decide what those are, depending on what your business, your vision and your strategies are.

A few things I've learned about good balanced scorecards over the years are:

The measures must consistently and explicitly link to your vision and strategy. It's no use measuring things that are not important to that, because measurement and reporting takes time and effort. So you ought to focus on the things that matter.

Keep it simple and focused. Too many measures, even if they are all relevant, will just make it too confusing to interpret, too costly and time-consuming to report on, and will cloud your decision making.

It doesn't all have to be done with numbers. Again, strange for a finance guy to say! But it's true. Sometimes, something as simple as a traffic light measure can be all you need to see if a particular factor is ok, not ok or needs some corrective action.

Use measures as both lead and lag indicators. Lag indicators tell you how you have done. Lead indicators tell you how things might work out. For example, employee engagement can be seen as how your employees were feeling when they did the survey (a lag indicator), but engagement can affect attrition and motivation in the future. So low employee engagement can be seen as a lead indicator to attrition (and therefore higher cost) and low motivation (again, higher cost and potentially higher error rates, which may affect customer service, and so on).

I once worked with a division of a big bank that had a balanced scorecard. We produced it monthly. But it had so many pages in it that it took almost four weeks to produce, only a couple of people in the management team read it all and it was impossible to review in monthly management meetings. So we revamped it, cutting it down by 50%, keeping only the measures that directly related to strategies. We also made the reporting more colourful. Sounds cosmetic, but it actually made it much quicker to read and digest. You could just look at it and focus on the red items, where attention was needed. It then also took half the time to produce every month. The effect of that was to give management more time to review the report, and more time for the Finance department to investigate some of the items further. In turn that led to more efficient and effective decision making in the monthly management meetings, and led to a more successful business.

If you don't use a balanced scorecard to manage your business, I would encourage you to think about it. It doesn't have to be huge and complex. Just think about all the different things that are important to your success, and try to find ways to regularly measure them and report on them.

© Charis Business Consulting Limited 2009

Making Business Change Successful

One of the things I have learnt through being involved in big projects in big companies is the value of "Change Management". When I worked as the Finance person involved with projects and programmes costing millions in a multi-billion pound group, I was initially surprised that we employed a Change Manager as well as a Project Manager.

So if Change Management is not the same as Project Management, then what is it and what are the distinguishing features? And more importantly why is it worth reading an article about? How will it help you in your small business?

The following are just my observations. I am not an expert, I haven't read any books on Change Management. I have simply seen great Change Managers at work (people like Chris Collison), and seen the value of what they do.

Project Management relates to the best practice procedures for running projects - what documentation you need to define the project's objectives, terms of reference, scope, etc; what phases it goes through and how you manage each phase; resource management; etc etc.

Change Management seems to me to involve softer skills. If Project Management is about how to implement change, Change Management is all about how you make the change successful, so that it achieves what you wanted it to. (Change Management is also broader than projects, looking at how organizations and people cope with inevitable change, turning it to their advantage.)

Three things that a Change Management focus brings to any project, from my experience:

Focus on benefits: Whereas Project Management will focus on what we are planning to change and how, Change Management will ask why. Why are we implementing this new computer system? Why are we introducing these new forms?

It doesn't even have to be a project. So you can have Change Management, even where you don't need a formal project.

If you always keep in mind why you are doing something, what it is designed to achieve, why it will be helpful or value-adding, then you will implement the change in such a way as to achieve those benefits.

Let's face it, you don't spend thousands of pounds putting a new system in just because you want a new system (well, you might, but you shouldn't if you are concerned about the value of your business!) - you implement a new system because you think it will be beneficial.

But you have to be explicit and intentional about those benefits if you really want to achieve them.

And the value of thinking in that way is that it reminds you of other things you need to do. For example, Project Management processes will (hopefully) ensure that you implement the system you intended to. But a Change Management mindset will help you understand the things you need to do (e.g. the training, communications, process change, etc) to get the benefits you want out of the new system.

Focus on the stakeholders: Who is going to be impacted by the change or the project you are proposing? If you don't think about them then you may end up adversely affecting their ability to do their jobs. Or you may not get buy-in to your change. You'll have a new system (say) that people don't want to use because it came in suddenly and they struggle to get used to it.

So you need to think about all the people and groups of people that will be affected in some way by what you are proposing. Do you need to consult with them and ask for their ideas? Do you need to inform them in advance, so they can get ready? Do you need to train them to use new procedures and systems? Do some people need to do things differently? Are you looking for cost savings in their departments, and you need them to reorganize to get the benefits you want?

Constantly communicate: Of course, this is really the other theme in the point above. All people who are affected by change need to be involved in some degree of communication. There will be some level of consultation, information, advising, training, directing with everyone who has a stake - and at all times, listening.

Listening, I have found, is an oft-neglected part of communication. But people impacted by change know their jobs better than you do, even if you are the manager of the team or the MD of the company. And they can tell you how the change will affect them, and whether you need to modify your project to cater for their concerns, so that they can continue to do their jobs properly.

In fact, change that arises from ideas generated by the people at the "sharp end" are often the ones that get the best buy-in and are the most successful in adding value.

Conclusion: When you are looking at a big change in your business, you need to take a hard look at who is going to be impacted by the change and what benefits you are trying to achieve. Then you can communicate effectively about the change and make sure that everyone who is affected contributes positively to achieving those benefits.

© Charis Business Consulting Limited 2009

The Importance of Regular Review

The Importance of Regularly Reviewing Your Finances

I was reminded the other day that many smaller businesses struggle
with knowing what financial information they should be looking at
on a regular basis. Some don't look at any financial information,
apart from maybe their bank statement, from one year to the next.
It's kind of a surprise once a year when the accountant takes their
plastic bag of receipts (or perhaps these days a memory stick might
go with the plastic bag!) and two weeks later they sit with their
accountant to find out how they did. Those in that position lack
confidence in whether they have enough money to spend on things for
the business, and they don't know whether they can do things better.

Other owners of smaller businesses lack confidence that they are
looking at the right things on a regular basis.

So here's a simple little checklist to allow you to healthcheck
what information you are looking at on a regular basis. Apologies
to those for whom this is stating the obvious.

First, you need to place priority on keeping the accounts up to
date on a daily basis or weekly basis at the least. If the
information in the accounting system isn't up to date, then the
reports you get out won't be up to date either. So you need your
bookkeeper, accountant, accounts clerks - whoever keeps your
accounts - to regularly post invoices (sales and purchases), bank
receipts and payments on your accounting system.

Second, you need to look at a profit and loss statement every
month, at least. A profit and loss statement (accountants tend to
call it a "P&L") shows your income/revenue and costs in the last
period. One minus the other is your profit or loss for the period.
The reason you look at it as a statement is that it can tell you
many interesting and useful things that you need to know.

For example, you may get a big surprise when you see your gross
margins (gross profit as a percentage of sales revenue) are 40% and
not 60% as you thought. So it prompts you to find out what's going
wrong there. Or you didn't know that someone had ordered a
particular thing and it's cost £1000, so you go and ask them why
they needed it and why they ordered it without telling you. You
can't leave these discoveries until the end of the year!

Just one quick note, because it's not obvious to everyone - make
sure that these monthly P&Ls are done on an "accruals basis". Say
that to your accountant or bookkeeper and they will know what you
mean. The accruals basis really just smoothes out lumpy expenditure
that you pay for in one month, but relates to a different month or
more than one month - so your audit fee that relates to last year,
or your insurance that relates to every month of next year, and so
on.

Third, you need to look also at a balance sheet every month as
well. The balance sheet is just a statement showing what you own,
what you owe and what is owed to you. Looking at it every month
will help you to see trends and start to understand how to manage
your cash better. It'll give you early warning of things going
wrong with your customer accounts, your stock management or bank
accounts.

Fourth, if you are not in a cash or retail business, and your
customers normally get invoices and pay later, then you will need
to keep a careful eye on who owes you what and when it is due. So
get yourself a detailed aged debtors list (aged just means it shows
the amounts owed in age categories depending whether they are
current, overdue, very overdue or extremely overdue). I would
advise looking at the aged debtors list on a weekly basis, and
keeping it on your desk. Know absolutely what is due in the next
week and keep asking your accounts people every day whether it has
arrived. This is the foundation of good credit control, and is
critical to making sure you keep enough cash in the business.

Lastly, for now, you need to think about what other information
would be useful on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Perhaps you
need to track your sales, revenues, order volumes, gross profits,
production quantities or whatever - the point of getting regular
information on how the business is doing is so that you know about
problems and successes as soon as they occur (and not a year
later!).

Remember, trying to manage the performance of a business without
using regular information is like an athlete trying to improve his
performance without timing himself.

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Charis FD is Your Friend in Finance. We help businesses with turnover roughly between £1m and £25m, that have not completely got to grips with the finances. Perhaps they are not making enough money, not generating enough cash, or perhaps the finances are simply disorganised and chaotic. We work with the directors and owners in a flexible and affordable way to take the pain out of managing the finances, so that the business can make more money and be even more successful than it already is.

We work mainly in Hampshire, Thames Valley and Central London at the moment.

If any of the above rings true for your business, we would like to hear from you. Either email us at enquiries@charisfd.com, telling us a bit about your business and your finance challenges, or go to our website www.charisfd.com. On our website you will find lots of information, and also a contact form to get in touch with us.

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That's it for this time.

If you have something that you would like us to write about that would help you in improving the finances of your small business, please let us know...

newsletter@charisfd.com

© Charis Business Consulting Limited 2009

Charis FD - Your Friend in Finance

I hope that you found the New Subscriber series of articles helpful over the last two months. They were designed to cover the full range of issues that form part of our business financial management model, centred on the Business Performance Management wheel. All the areas are designed to help you take control of the business finances and manage the finances intentionally.

The purpose of doing the series, apart from giving you some helpful advice, was to do two things:

Firstly, I hoped to demonstrate that Charis FD has a rational model for business financial management, a model that makes sense and covers all the important challenges that you face in making money in your SME.

Second, I hoped to give you an insight into the role that a Finance Director can play in your business. Many small business owners have built their businesses on their own, and whilst they may have met Finance Directors they don't really know exactly what they do or why they might need one.

There is a common misconception that Finance Directors and Finance people in general are simply "bean counters". They punch the numbers into the system and tell you how much money you are making. But you will have gathered by now that there is much more that they can offer. They can help you to be clear on your strategy, to plan effectively; they can help you decide which actions are worth doing, what changes will add value; they can help you measure and monitor business performance and analyse it in order to help make effective decisions; they can help you manage stakeholders; and they can help to manage risk and put in place an internal control system to help to prevent losses and errors.

But here is the tension that you may be feeling now: You can see where your business would benefit from getting better in all the areas we've talked about. But you don't have the time or the confidence in doing it yourself. But neither do you have enough money to employ someone full-time to be a Finance Director in your business and sort it all out. And, to be honest, it may not be a full time job if your business is in the under-£20m turnover bracket.

If that's what you are feeling, then Charis FD's service may be for you. We specialise in delivering assistance to people like you in a flexible and affordable way. Our service has broadly four levels, depending on your needs and your budget. We can provide you with a programme of assistance, combining telephone and email support with a varying number of days onsite working with you. We could be with you as little as one day per month or as much as two days a week.

Our aim is to give you confidence in managing the business finances, which will lead to, amongst other things, improved profitability and better cashflow.

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If you want to talk to us, we're quite happy to give you a call to talk more about your business and the challenges you face. And you may be eligible for a free Finance Strategy Review session. To set that up either email us at enquiries@charisfd.com, remembering to leave your phone number and email address; or go to our website and complete the contact form.

If you want to look back on any of the previous email newsletters we have sent, they are on the Creative Finance & Management blog.

Thanks again for subscribing to Creative Finance & Management. We hope you find it helpful.

© Charis Business Consulting Limited 2009

This is the last in an 8-part series especially for new subscribers to the Creative Finance & Management email newsletter. Every week we are sending you an article aimed at helping you to think about a different aspect of the financial management of your business. This is in addition to the normal bi-weekly newsletter. We are doing it to give all new subscribers the same orientation to the way that Charis FD thinks about small business performance management. That way we can have confidence that all our subscribers have been given the benefit of foundational advice in all aspects of business performance management.

If you missed any of these articles, don't worry. They are on the Creative Finance & Management blog. Just look for the "New_Subscribers" tag.

These are the articles in the New Subscribers series:

1. The ingredients for success in Finance
2. Strategy and Planning
3. Business Change - implementing your strategic plans
4. Measurement and Management go together
5. Paralysis without analysis
6. Your Finance team - a valued asset
7. Stakeholder management - the importance of keeping people happy
8. Internal Control - 3 fallacies that add risk to your business

Here we go again: ...

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Internal Control - 3 fallacies that add risk to your business

Fallacy number one - internal control is boring. Ok, so that's not a fallacy! Internal control IS boring in my opinion. Some of you may even be saying, "What is internal control anyway? Certainly sounds like something boring. Sounds like something that big companies with big auditors might be interested in. But not me!"

No! Please don't switch off, don't close this window and read no further!

Saying that internal control is boring is a bit like a train driver saying that railway tracks, signals and points are boring! He's right, they ARE boring! But if someone doesn't provide those key controls then the train's going to crash. In fact it won't even get going very far.

The same is true in business with internal control. Without controls, your business is going to crash unless it is unfeasibly lucky. So listen up, this will save you much pain.

Fallacy number two - internal control is technical and complex. It certainly can be, but for a smaller business it doesn't have to be.

Internal control is really all about safeguarding the assets of the business, including its cash. And just like safeguarding the assets of your home, mostly it's common sense.

So you could have physical controls, like locks on the premises, access control systems, putting your money in a safe at the end of the day, keeping confidential documents in a locked cupboard, etc.

Authorisation controls are another type of controls. Particularly important when you have employees, these controls just ensure that people get permission from another more senior person (maybe yourself) before they go ahead with something. It may be signing a contract, making an offer to a prospective customer, buying things, or paying for things. Like I said, common sense.

But have you considered that there are certain things that the same person should not be responsible for? These controls are referred to as "segregation of duties", and are mainly geared to avoiding the opportunity for fraud. For instance, if your bookkeeper opens the post in the morning, banks the money received in the post from customers, records the receipt in the accounting system and performs the bank reconciliation, then they have opportunity to make all the right entries in the accounting system but pocket the money themselves. It would take you months to uncover it.

Or another common example: A purchase ledger clerk who is able to set up new suppliers on the accounting system, record purchase invoices and make payments to suppliers, could easily set up a fictitious supplier, record a fictitious invoice and get them paid. Similarly with payroll - don't let someone set up new employees if they are the ones running the calculations and/or making the payments.

There are also review controls and reconciliation controls. These are very important too. Review controls just mean you, or someone senior, looks over something (like a bank statement) to see if they see anything unusual or suspicious. Then they sign it to evidence that they looked at it. Reconciliation controls are really accounting controls. They give comfort that the entries in the accounting system are grounded in facts verifiable from external evidence. Proper reconciliation and review controls make fraud very difficult.

So the simplest reconciliation control is the bank reconciliation. Any person with any experience in finance, from your bookkeeper to your FD, will tell you that this is the most fundamental. In it you are showing that the bank balance showing in your accounts reconciles to your actual bank statement balance. It probably won't agree to your statement, because you may have written a cheque that has been recorded as a payment but not presented by the payee yet. That's why we say that it "reconciles". Reconciling items are adjustments that need to be made to show that the accounts reconcile to the external evidence. If those reconciling items don't make sense, perhaps because they are too old, then something may be going wrong and further investigation is required.

You can do a reconciliation wherever you have external evidence. So the bank reconciliation relates to the bank statement. You can also do supplier statement reconciliations to give comfort that all purchase invoice entries and supplier payment entries in your accounting system are correct.

Fallacy number 3 - it's something to leave to my FD and my auditor. Your auditor may check up on internal control once a year in order to get comfort that they can sign off their audit opinion on your accounts. Your FD (if you have one) is probably the one to whom you have delegated the worry about it.

But internal control, legally, is the responsibility of all directors - with joint and several liability. So it is something to work together on, supporting each other.

The thing about internal control is that it is restrictive. It says to your employees that they have to go through certain hoops before they are allowed to do things, or they have to put a signature on something to say they've done something, or they have to do things a certain way. In a lot of cases, though, employees just want to fulfil their main objective - to make the sale, to finish the batch quickly, to stock the shelves, or whatever. They heave a huge sigh, knowing that Finance has said they have to count, sign, go and get a manager, etc. They may rebel because they can't see the purpose.

I have seen businesses lose lots of money because the directors left Finance isolated in those situations. They didn't see control as a collective responsibility, and they shunted the control issues to the bottom of the management team agenda (which they hardly ever got to).

Conclusion: Internal control is important. I would encourage you to think about what procedures you need to put in place to protect your business assets and cash, and to make sure that all your information is accurate. Listen to the advice of your auditor, accountant and bookkeeper. As the business gets bigger and you delegate more and more authority, the more structured you will need to be.

But please don't write off the issue as boring, otherwise your business will pay eventually.

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If you want to talk to us, we're quite happy to give you a call to talk more about your business and the challenges you face. And you may be eligible for a free Finance Strategy Review session. To set that up either email us at enquiries@charisfd.com, remembering to leave your phone number and email address; or go to our website and complete the contact form.

Thanks again for subscribing to Creative Finance & Management. We hope you find it helpful.

© Charis Business Consulting Limited 2009

This is number 7 in an 8-part series especially for new subscribers to Creative Finance & Management. Every week we are sending you an article aimed at helping you to think about a different aspect of the financial management of your business. This is in addition to the normal bi-weekly newsletter. We are doing it to give all new subscribers the same orientation to the way that Charis FD thinks about small business performance management. That way we can have confidence that all our subscribers have been given the benefit of foundational advice in all aspects of business performance management.

If you miss any of these articles, don't worry. They are on the Creative Finance & Management blog. Just look for the "New_Subscribers" tag.

These are the articles in the New Subscribers series:

1. The ingredients for success in Finance
2. Strategy and Planning
3. Business Change - implementing your strategic plans
4. Measurement and Management go together
5. Paralysis without analysis
6. Your Finance team - a valued asset
7. Stakeholder management - the importance of keeping people happy
8. Internal Control - 3 fallacies that add risk to your business

Here we go again: ...

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Stakeholder management - the importance of keeping people happy

You already know this in all probability, so I will try not to labour the point, but there are many relationships involved in running your business. A lot of them you could call stakeholders. Stakeholders are people or entities that have an interest in your business.

The term is used really to make it clear that businesses do not just exist for shareholders - those who own the business. There are other people and organisations that are affected by and/or interested in the success of the business. They can also affect the success of the business, and you need them on board to help you achieve your vision. So they should be given some attention as well.

If you want examples, stakeholders would be the likes of: customers, suppliers, shareholders, lenders, bankers, employees, local residents, landlords, insurance agents, recruitment agencies, HMRC, pensions providers, auditors, tax advisors, corporate finance advisors, company secretary, non-executive directors, other board members, (maybe the media, your competitors and industry regulators could be others).

Here is another area where you need to be intentional and analytical. Relationships need to be managed. You can't leave them to chance. If you are not managing these relationships right now, why not? Is it because you don't like others interfering in your business? If that's the reason then here's my suggestion for a mindset change - why not see these stakeholders as your teammates, with different skills, abilities, expertise, network contacts, access to funds, wanting your business to succeed and ready to help? Twenty heads are better than one?

And when I say that relationships need to be managed intentionally, I am not saying that you have to be on the phone every week to every single person you identify as a stakeholder. But you have decide intentionally whether you are going to give them any attention and if so, how much and of what sort.

So here's what I think you should do now:

First, brainstorm a list of the stakeholders in your business (and I mean each one, not each category - so each customer and each supplier). Then, for each person or organisation, make a note of:

What do they get out of your business?

Why is your business important to them?

How would you classify their relationship with you (customer, supplier, advisor, investor, etc)? There could be more than one answer.

What do you and your business get out of them?

What else could you get out of them?

How important is this relationship to the success of your business (rate 1 to 10 or High, Medium, Low)?

What is likely to happen if they didn't like you (and on a scale of 1-10 how disastrous would that be for the business)?

What could happen if they liked you more?

How good is your relationship with them (1-10)?

Given the importance of the relationship noted above, how good should your relationship be (1-10)?

What is your relationship strategy for this person or organization (actively develop, regular update on business, mine for leads, no proactive management, etc)?

Finally, there are some stakeholders that are so important that they need extra special attention. Those would be shareholders, customers, lenders, employees, (perhaps some key suppliers and contractors), landlords, bankers and auditors. If they withdrew their funds or their services, or published an adverse comment about your business, you would be stuffed! Perhaps it's worth thinking whether a little bit of extra effort on your part might keep them happy. Perhaps you could give them a little more information than they request, or phone them with an update when they haven't asked, beat deadlines, offer a tour of your facilities, etc. Some things don't cost anything, but they buy lots of goodwill. You never know when you may need them to be understanding!

The next CF&M new subscriber newsletter is the last one, and we'll be looking at internal control - 3 fallacies that add risk to your business.

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See you then...

If at any stage you want to talk to us, we're quite happy to give you a call to talk more about your business and the challenges you face. And you may be eligible for a free Finance Strategy Review session. To set that up either email us at enquiries@charisfd.com, remembering to leave your phone number and email address; or go to our website and complete the contact form.

Thanks again for subscribing to Creative Finance & Management. We hope you find it helpful.

© Charis Business Consulting Limited 2009

This is number 6 in an 8-part series especially for new subscribers to the Creative Finance & Management email newsletter. Every week we are sending you an article aimed at helping you to think about a different aspect of the financial management of your business. This is in addition to the normal bi-weekly newsletter. We are doing it to give all new subscribers the same orientation to the way that Charis FD thinks about small business performance management. That way we can have confidence that all our subscribers have been given the benefit of foundational advice in all aspects of business performance management.

If you miss any of these articles, don't worry. They are on the Creative Finance & Management blog. Just look for the "New_Subscribers" tag.

These are the articles in the New Subscribers series:

1. The ingredients for success in Finance
2. Strategy and Planning
3. Business Change - implementing your strategic plans
4. Measurement and Management go together
5. Paralysis without analysis
6. Your Finance team - a valued asset
7. Stakeholder management - the importance of keeping people happy
8. Internal Control - 3 fallacies that add risk to your business

Here we go: ...

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Your Finance Team - a Valued Asset

If you have read all the articles that we have sent to you in this new subscriber series, you will hopefully have learnt something not only about managing business performance, but also about the skills and expertise that professional finance people can bring to your business. So I'm actually not going to labour on about the value of finance people and accountants, as the title suggests.

What I am going to do is try to get you thinking about what resources you might need in your Finance function. Perhaps there may be areas you haven't thought of. And if I can help you to get your Finance function fit for purpose then your business performance wheel will turn a lot more smoothly and you will be more successful.

I'd like to think about the Finance function as a set of resources consisting of processes, systems and people. People operate processes, and systems help to facilitate and automate processes. All the elements interact with each other.

Let's think about how Finance functions develop as a business grows, as that may indicate the priority of various elements.

The first thing you ever employ an accountant to do is to set up your company and then prepare and audit its annual accounts and tax computations. This is almost universally true of small businesses - even I have an accountant who does that for me, and I'm a qualified accountant myself!! This is what I would call the compliance requirement.

Above a certain threshold the law says you have to have an audit (if you are trading through a limited company), so you will never get away from a relationship with an external accountancy practice. But you may get to the point where you have the expertise in house to prepare the accounts and save money on their fees! Only the very very big companies have internal tax people, and even they still spend money on tax advice from the accounting firms.

In the early stages you record all the transactions yourself. After a while the business gets too big for you to cope with that, and so you employ a bookkeeper. You also have an accounting system. This is the transaction recording requirement.

In the early days your accounting system may have been a book, a file or a spreadsheet. Then you may have got a proper package like Sage or MYOB. Perhaps you've now got to the stage where you've moved onto something more flexible and with better functionality - like Microsoft AX, Great Plains or Navision.

The key things about your accounting system are that it is there to help you meet both the compliance requirements (holding proper accounting records, and doing VAT returns), and to help you measure your business performance. It becomes a key enabler of your business performance management wheel. If you want information out of it to measure your performance you have to be able to put accurate base data into it somehow. And that's where you need to have a look at the transaction recording processes and see whether you have a problem with GIGO - "Garbage In Garbage Out"!

Back to the growth story... So you're employing a bookkeeper to record transactions in a system, but you are writing the sales invoices yourself and paying your suppliers with your chequebook, your business debit card or through internet banking. At some stage that gets too onerous, so you take on an accounts clerk or two. They take care of the operational finance and control requirement.

So you may now have a Purchase Ledger Clerk recording the supplier invoices and preparing payment runs for you to authorise. You may also have an Invoice Clerk, preparing all the sales invoices to send out. On a part-time basis you may also have a Payroll Clerk or outsource the payroll to a bureau. Between them they could also take care of the bookkeeping requirements, but you may then want an accountant to make sure that all the operational finance, control and transaction recording processes are tied together.

I added the word control in with operational finance to indicate that once you delegate your invoicing, recording and payments, you need to have controls to ensure that people are doing things correctly. This is even more true when you are employing more people elsewhere in the business, since they will need procedures to follow to spend money or commit the business to contracts. I will talk more about this in my eighth article in this series. The point for now is that transactional controls are guarded by the Finance team on your behalf.

By this stage you are normally struggling to get information out of the system to measure the performance of the business if you try to do it yourself. If you are taking note of what I've been saying in previous articles then unless you are a whizz with Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, database queries and pivot tables, you will probably already have an in-house accountant doing reports for you. This is the business performance management requirement.

So you see, whilst I have been talking about business performance management constantly in these articles, I do understand that there is a lot more to the core Finance function. And these core activities need to be managed properly and grow with the business.

Conversely, these weekly articles may have opened your eyes to how much more can be built on your core Finance team in order to help you to manage the performance of the business.

At some stage of growth the business will need a Head of Finance or a Finance Director, a fully qualified accountant with a few years of business experience, to help you manage the full range of core finance (compliance, transaction recording, operational finance and control) and business performance management activities. Has your business reached that stage yet? Have these articles opened your eyes to how much more you should be doing to manage your business performance?

For many businesses there will be a stage where they have a small Finance team and know they need to do more in the realm of business performance management, but they cannot justify the cost of a senior Finance person or think there wouldn't be enough work for a full time role. The fledgling Finance team also probably needs some guidance and direction from someone more experienced.

That's where a flexible service such as the one offered by Charis FD comes in handy. We can provide advice and hands on support in all elements of business performance management, including helping you manage your Finance team, on an ongoing basis. And we can do that by being on site with you anything from one day a month to two days a week or more. Have a look at our website for further details.

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If at any stage you want to talk to us, we're quite happy to give you a call to talk more about your business and the challenges you face. And you may be eligible for a free Finance Strategy Review session. To set that up either email us at enquiries@charisfd.com, remembering to leave your phone number and email address; or go to our website and complete the contact form.

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