Stop Looking At Your Financial Statements
Jason M. Blumer, CPA
CPA leading a firm for creative consultancies, firms, agencies, service providers, and an expert at team scaling, team structuring, and restructuring.
As a good accountant, I've fought this advice for many years. It's been ingrained into me because I've been taught my value was in helping clients understand their financial statements. But that is not what we do at all.
As a firm that exclusively serves the financial, tax, accounting, growth, and coaching needs of agencies all over the US, we help agency owners become mature business owners (go look, our purpose is right there on the front of our website: blumercpas.com). Becoming mature does notmean you have to understand financial statements. It seems agency owners feel guilty that they don't understand their financial statements.
If you did understand your financial statements, then you may be better off than most agency owners, but it's not a requirement to run a profitable, successful agency. So, what should you understand if you don't have to understand your financial statements?
Before I answer that, let me tell you what financial statements do for business owners:
- financial statements are historical, only telling you what happened in the past,
- they do not look forward in a strategic way to tell you what you should do next, and
- they are chocked full of numbers that totally confuse agency owners.
In our firm, we love to give our agency owners:
- summarized data that they can use to make decisions,
- limited data so that they do not look at everything,
- regular data that pulses the financial heart of their company on a regular basis, and
- future numbers that attempt to predict cash flow.
A dashboard holds all of this data and they can look at one page to consume it all on a regular basis. We'll keep the background details in order while they look at the big picture.
CPA and B2B Copywriter | Ghostwriter for Accountants and Bookkeepers
8 年Great approach to providing value to clients. Yes, it takes a bit more time, but it's so much more useful than just tossing a tax return or a set of financials at a client.And a lot more fun than just doing the compliance work!
? We help business owners and high earners achieve tax efficient successful outcomes | putmanfinancialgroup.com
8 年Well said, Jason - Financials only provide part of the equation that a business owner needs to succeed. The implementation of a solid dashboard tailored to the clients KPI's is where the value is at!
CPA leading a firm for creative consultancies, firms, agencies, service providers, and an expert at team scaling, team structuring, and restructuring.
8 年Thanks Eric Killian How are you doing?
Founder of The Fitness CPA
8 年The Fathom team is great. I highly recommend them. Met them at Xerocon this past year and really think they have the prescription. Of course coming up with a set of intelligent KPIs to use in Fathom is where we can bring value to our clients.