How to master the financial side of your business

Ah finances. Or should we say, Oh, finances. Finances plague us in all walks of life, whether it be home or business or school or whatnot, but business finance especially can be a plague, especially if we allow ourselves to get sloppy. Thank goodness that business is an old, old art, because we have plenty of good examples to follow, and plenty of little tips and tricks on hand for mastering the financial side of business. Let's talk about a few of them, and take one step closer to mastering the financial side of business.

- A rather obvious step for mastering the financial side of business is: hiring the right accountants. Putting together an accounting team is a crucial part of mastering the financial side of business. If we're leading a business, we'll have to become a master of every single aspect of it. We won't have time to focus on one area alone; this means we need to find good, hard-working, intelligent, innovative, creative people to do the detail work. This is especially true of the financial aspect of business. One way to familiarize ourselves with the best accountants available is to first do a little research and discover the top-rated schools for accounting. We need to know why they're top-rated-what sort of accountants are they churning out, what are the unique skills possessed by these accountants. Finding one good accountant, and slowly, over the years, adding to this number as we need to, is of paramount importance if we desire to master the financial aspect of business.

- Next come records. Again, it may seem obvious. Of course it is! It's the obvious things we tend to skip, and when they start to build we start to feel it. If we remember anything about mastering the financial side of business, it should be this: tiny things done daily will help us to rise above the water; tiny things ignored daily will drown us eventually. As businesses owners, we keep different books that track this or that aspect of our business. What we buy, what we sell, profits, expenditures, taxes, and so forth. Ideally, we have a sort of general book that covers all these topics and then specific books for each topic.
- As the business owner, the general book is our mainstay; our battle plan; our master method of mastering the financial side of business. It is paramount that we turn to this book every day; that we keep track of all of our investments, purchases, expenditures, etc., large and small, daily. Now, if our company is a big one, or if it begins growing into a big one, there will come a happy point when we have other things occupying our minds besides how many paper clips were purchased last week and can we find a cheaper paper dealer. But for now, when we're first learning to master the financial side of business, we've got to hone in on these little things and always know the financial state of our business.
- Again, our accountant(s) will be of fundamental help here-but remember-and this may be the most important thing we've discussed so far-we don't want our accountant(s) to know more about our business finances than we do. In other words, we don't want to put our company's finances solely in the hands of the accountant(s); we want to know, ideally, as much or more than our accountant(s) regarding our business's finances.
- Many a business owner has learned too late that it's a bad idea to entrust key aspects of business (such as finances) into the hands of one person or one group of people. Not only can we get cheated that way, we're giving folks that work for us more power than we have ourselves. We want our accountant(s) to know that we're constantly aware of the changes, the rises and falls, the long steady stretches, of our business finances.