Modern accountants are more than just number whisperers; they're also strategists, advisors and business pros. All accountants do is listen to entrepreneurs and try to solve their problems or give them sound advice. They’ve seen it all.
They can give you an in-depth look into your company's financial performance, track your cash flow and show you potential paths for expansion — all of which will help you build your business and increase revenue.
In this blog, we’ll cover ways the right accountant can help you grow your small business and provide examples of how we’ve helped our own clients take their businesses to the next level.
Business owners may have an accountant, lawyer, wealth advisor and banker, but who do they rely on to create a strategic plan for their business?
CPAs are the most trusted advisors for 86% of small business owners. They have the financial expertise and experience in business to help set clear business goals and objectives.
The real magic happens when you can get your investment advisor, banker and CPA in a room together, helping you set a plan for your financial future that aligns with your personal and business goals.
Determining your long-term vision for your business is a great place to start. After hearing the full picture of what you’re working toward, a good accountant can help you build a roadmap to move you closer to your goals.
Next, you’d describe what your life needs to look like in three years to achieve your 10-year dream life. How much is your business doing in revenue? What about profit?
And then, you can break your three-year goal into the next 12 months. For example, if your goal is to do $3 million in three years, what needs to be achieved in one year to ensure you’re on track to hit the three-year goal? Do you need a new marketing strategy to generate $100,000 a month in new business? Bring in more website leads? Focus on more profitable clients? It’s time to set some goals for the next year.
The right accountant can help a small business measure progress by linking profits and processes, making it easy to pinpoint your business’s growth and problem areas. The hardest part is determining which metrics are most important to your specific business. True North can help you create key performance indicators (KPIs) and set up reporting to help you measure your progress. We can also:
With a clear direction of where you want to take your business and the goals set, it's time to strategize how to achieve these results.
If it's a revenue growth goal, we’ll need to make a strategy for increasing the number, size and frequency of sales. If it’s a spending goal, we’ll help you set budgets for spending, advise on how to meet those budgets and keep you informed regularly on how you’re meeting them. And if it’s a profit or cashflow goal, in addition to the first two examples, we can analyze your pricing and profit margins for each of the services/product lines being sold.
Financial analysis is centred around two types of analyses: trend analysis (period-to-period changes) and ratio analysis (expense as a % of revenue). There’s also a break-even analysis, which shows how much the business needs in revenue to break even.
We can also help you build an all-encompassing financial plan (ideally in collaboration with your wealth advisor), which will maximize your wealth in the long term. Here are some things we can include in these financial plans:
The last type is benchmarking — which, until now, has only been available to the largest of businesses. True North has tools that can compare your business to similar companies in Canada to understand the competition.
One of the most powerful tools in your arsenal will be financial forecasting. Reviewing your past financial performance, your accountant can create projections to help you predict future revenues, expenses and profits. These projections can help you understand your small business’s trajectory while identifying opportunities and managing risk. Financial forecasting can help you track progress toward your growth goals and adjust your strategy if needed.
The real entrepreneurial journey can be rough, and the road can be long. Sometimes you may need to break commitments you’ve made, lay people off or go without some comforts you’ve taken for granted. Lean on True North to help you make the right decisions for your business and show you the necessary actions to make it through your small business path.
Clients often ask whether they’re spending too much on a particular expense. This isn’t easy to answer, as each business is different, and each business owner is in a different stage.
If you plan to make a specific profit amount, and your costs are relatively predictable, accountants can help you create a budget tailored to your small business needs and goals. Budgeting can help you stay on target, meet financial obligations and allocate your financial resources to invest in growth opportunities.
Benchmarking lets you see how much you spend in certain areas compared to other businesses (for example, for payroll, ad spending, etc.).
Reviewing your budgeting and benchmarking can provide much insight during the year and help you make those big decisions. Ideally, your company’s payroll and revenue should be in lockstep; one shouldn’t increase without the other — this advice is essential for service-based businesses.
True North can provide your small business with the necessary expertise and guidance to help you navigate the complex world of tax planning, reduce your tax liability and grow your business.
We can:
Accountants can help you obtain small business loans, grants or equity investments to support your fund expansion or other growth initiatives. True North can:
By offering their expertise in business processes and operations, smart accountants can help small businesses identify opportunities for improvement and enhance their operational efficiency.
True North can help evaluate and implement technology and software that streamline processes and reduce manual tasks, such as:
We can:
The ways accountants can help you are expanding rapidly as AI, machine learning, open APIs, blockchain, and open banking start changing how we do business. True North will keep you on the cutting edge of these changes and help you take advantage of the benefits before the masses catch on.
True North can help you manage risk by reviewing economic fluctuations, regulatory changes and market shifts that may impact operational efficiency and your business’s ability to grow. We can also:
Your accounting firm can assist your small business with business restructuring and valuation. Here’s how True North can help:
Accountants review your income and expenses, but can they help you increase revenue and profit? You may be surprised at how a smart accountant or business advisor can help your bottom line. They can:
to set the minimum sales target to cover costs. This must be understood and monitored regularly for businesses struggling to get out of the red.
As your accountant, we can help your small business increase its resilience and ability to succeed in the turbulent decade ahead of us.
We’ve all seen the impact changes in interest rates and prices have on business. True North can help you adapt and pivot the financial structure of your business to minimize additional costs or losses. We can help identify other potential funding sources, such as loans, grants, or investors. They can also help prepare financial projections and navigate the application process to increase the chances of obtaining financing.
Inflation increased wages so much this last year that many businesses explored hiring offshore or implementing automation to allow more productivity with fewer people.
Your accountant can help adapt to new tax incentives, credits or deductions that can help reduce your business's tax liability and free up cash flow for growth initiatives. Governments use tax rates to influence the behaviours they’d like to see, and we can help you adapt to changing tax regulations before you get burned by them.
The pace of technological advancement we’re seeing in 2023 is unprecedented. Everyone has their own ideas, hopes and fears of how these new apps are going to change the way we live, the way we work and how we do business.
When will bookkeeping become automated? We’ll let you know as soon as we see it ourselves, but we’re on it.
In the meantime, Xero is the accounting software we recommend to streamline your business’s financial management processes and help you make data-driven decisions about growth initiatives. But simplifying your business starts with the right workflows and a few simple daily habits — ask us about these!
True North can help you navigate the frontier of new industries and the expected decline of traditional industries. We can share the insights we’ve gathered from our other business clients. We can help you develop a business plan that outlines your growth objectives and the resources needed to achieve them. This will help your business stay focused while you expand during these uncertain 2020s!
We consider ourselves as partnering with our clients. At a minimum, we’re their most trusted advisor. To be more effective, we aim to build strong relationships with others that serve the same clients we do. We have a wide network of wealth advisors, lawyers, insurance brokers, bankers, IT providers and other business consultants. If you ask us, there’s a good chance we know someone that can help. Here are some of our favourite partners to help your business: accountants, bookkeepers, insurance brokers, IT providers and financial planners.
We’ve also got a list of apps, tools and templates to help you with bookkeeping, accounting and invoicing, file storage and organization, HR and payroll, security, marketing and collaboration.
Like coding or music, accounting is a language, and every business has a story to tell. A good accountant can review financial statements and draw out the story of the business's journey during its life, year or month. We can help with the following:
We’ve helped our clients with the following:
As a small business owner, you’re responsible for many different aspects of your business. We’re here to help with the numbers, provide the financial guidance you need to succeed and support you as you create a growth plan. Learn more about our small business advisory services, and let us be your go-to guide.
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