Shownotes
Like it or not business is a numbers game, and knowing the state of your business is essential to sound strategic business decisions.
Kristy has a gift for understanding numbers and organizing them in a way that anyone can benefit from them. Although she always knew she was good at numbers, she resisted this for a while. She finally gave way to the talent that God has given her, leaned into it, and has enjoyed it ever since.
Join us as we discuss a few mistakes to avoid in your accounting as well as some tips to keep on track.
Redeem Your Business Today by the Following:
How can we honor God in our business?
Walk in integrity of who we are as God’s children. The decisions you make should be different than those the world makes. Don’t compromise your integrity.
One challenge for today.
Pray over your desk each morning that the work that comes to it and from it will be used to Glorify God. It also helps to remind us that all we have is from God. So we stay humble and grateful.
Mistakes To Avoid
- Mixing personal and business finances
- Not paying yourself as the owner fairly once the business is making money
- Not reviewing reoccurring expenses and eliminating those you no longer need
Tips For Bookkeeping:
- Keep up on your bookkeeping
- Set reminders to review, keep up, and close quickly
- Close the month within 7-10 days of month end
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YouTube: @KristyBarberConsulting
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Facebook: @kristybarberconsulting1
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Mentioned in this episode:
What God Says About Business: 5 Uncommon Truths for Modern Business
If you want to go deeper in your walk with God and integrate your faith and business this is the tool to make it happen. God has laid out the path to success without the regrets and emptiness that come with success the world's way. Download your FREE e-booklet today. A 10-minute investment of your time will return a lifetime of transformation.
Leadership GPS: Christian Business Coaching
Are you looking to integrate your faith and business but don't know where to start, book a time to discover if Christian business coaching and training might be right for you. If you are dissatisfied with your current rate of improvement, desire a clearer vision of what God says about business, or even what those first steps may look like, let's talk.
Transcripts
David:
[0:00] Well, hello. I'm excited to have with me today Kristy Barber from Kristy Barber Consulting. She takes care of financial services. She was a CFO of a manufacturing plant, making small airplane engines, which is kind of cool. And now she helps her talents to help business owners streamline their financial books and keeping and all that. So welcome to the Redeeming Business Today podcast, Kristy. Glad to have you here.
Kristy:
[0:27] Thank you.
David:
[0:29] So one of the things I'd like to start off with asking our guests is, what is one way you believe that we can honor God in our business that other people may not have seen or known about?
Kristy:
[0:41] I think there's a couple things. One that always comes to me is just the integrity of who we are and our values and what God has told us in the Bible of these are the things that we follow. And when you get outside of that, sometimes in the world, things can get a little shady and people want to do things different ways that aren't necessarily in alignment with the morals and values that we've been taught. And I see that a lot in business. And when you look at things from a Christian perspective and having all of that, I myself, I know, make decisions very differently than other people. And especially with clients, if I know, hey, it's going to be X dollars to do something, I'm going to charge it at this where you may get another company and they're looking because the dollar is their god, and they need to hit a certain number. They may charge things differently or maybe not give as much value for the dollar. But I've seen a lot of that.
David:
[1:41] Okay. No, that's good. Thank you for sharing that. So, you are doing accounting work right now. Take a few minutes to share your journey where you started and how you got to where you are today
Kristy:
[1:52] Yeah. So, I started out in accounting. I always give the story. My grandpa told me, go to school, learn numbers, because once you know numbers, you’re worth gold. Because a lot of people can't read financial statements, and they don't necessarily understand how to understand the numbers in a business. And he told me, if you could do that, you'll always have a job. And so that's what I did. And I worked for a handful of different companies, ended up at a manufacturing plant that made airplane engines for small planes. And I started out there just doing the accounting work, moved into a whole bunch of different things because it was small and got to see pretty much how a whole manufacturing plant worked from start to finish. And I love that. I love manufacturing and how things work. You start with a piece of metal, and you end up with something that shifts out a door and helps somebody with an in-product. And then soon after that, I went out on my own because I realized, hey, I really would like to work for myself. I've always had that goal since I was young.
Kristy:
[2:54] So yeah, I did that. Started out just doing a lot of bookkeeping accounting services and then have moved more so over the last probably seven, eight years into more fractional work, but then also looking at accounting departments, how to streamline them we're looking at do you have the right software that's running in your accounting and then do you have the right processes in place of when I need to look at my AR do we have a process or is it just hey when money comes in the money comes in and then we want to make sure that things like that are getting taken care of so I love the inner workings of just how the accounting department works and how it is in everything in a business whether you want to see that or not some people like, no, they're just those people over there.
David:
[3:42] Very good. So, you mentioned fractional accounting. What is fractional accounting?
Kristy:
[3:49] Fractional accounting would be a lot of smaller companies. They may not necessarily need somebody full-time, or they may not yet be in a place where they can afford a CFO full-time. And my services just come, hey, do you need me 10 hours a week? You need me 10 hours a month. You need me, whatever that works for each client specifically. And that's how you get to the fractional part of it is no, I don't have anybody that's 40 hours a week. It's all over the place from as little sometimes as two to three hours a week.
David:
[4:21] Okay. So fractional just means that you're splitting your time up between all these different companies. Okay. I never knew what that meant. So that's, that's helpful. Very good. I sometimes feel like I'm a fractional parent, you know, because I have so many kids and trying to give my time to them. Yeah. So, what types of services do you love to do right now? I know you mentioned a few different ones.
Kristy:
[4:45] Yeah. So right now, I love to help people get all of their accounting organized. So, the first part is looking at the processes of how the accounting department works, AR, AP, if you have intercompany transactions, making sure that processes are in place, everybody knows what they're doing. Because the worst part is somebody may leave, or somebody goes out on a long vacation, and you have to learn what that person was doing. So, when you have those in place, it really helps streamline everything and make sure that you're not leaving things kind of sitting somewhere. So that's the main thing. And then looking at things from a budgeting forecasting perspective, where are you today? Where do you want to be? How can we help put a plan together by reading through the financial statements, making sure that everybody's up to speed on what they're saying, and then just kind of a little bit of everything in between. Do you have the right accounting system? Are you on QuickBooks? Have you outgrown it? Or is your company moving to an ERP solution and you need some guidance around that? I've done a lot of ERP implementation selections over the last five, six, seven years. So just very familiar with that world too and how important it is.
David:
[6:00] Okay. I suppose ERPs are like everything else. There's probably not just two or three, there's probably 50 of them out there.
Kristy:
[6:06] Oh, there's tons. And depending on what you do and which industry specifically, there's one just for you.
David:
[6:13] Okay. Yeah. So, there's like shoes, one size doesn't fit all, but there's some out there that will fit you as a business then.
Kristy:
[6:20] Yep.
David:
[6:22] Well, that's nice having you be able to have some knowledge on that to help guide and direct that way. I know some clients of mine and other people; they don't really know where they are financially throughout the year. They kind of wait till the end of the year. Then they look at all the books and then they go, oh, that's where I'm at. How do you solve that for them? It'd be nice to know on a week by week or at least on a monthly basis, where am I at financially? Am I selling what I need to sell and expenses under control. How do you work that?
Kristy:
[6:53] It depends. At the least, I review with my clients every month. Some of them we review on a weekly basis just because of what they do, and they have specific goals they need to reach on a weekly or even bi-monthly basis. That way, I'm pulling reports for them with their financials. Usually, it's just the profit and loss statement. And then maybe we have some other little reports that we've made along the way of just looking at, you know, sales forecasting. Is it matching what their team had put together? And are we hitting those numbers from an accounting perspective? And so, reviewing that. And then the good part about meeting more often and reviewing these is you can pivot and tweak things along the way, where if you wait until the end of the year, it's one of those, oh, no moments. I wish I had known before X, Y, Z, I could have fixed this or whatnot. And I think a big thing is CPAs, the tax advisors, always at the end of the year, they're telling you, well, if you buy some new equipment, we can write this off. And you're like, that's great. But I need to know more of what my numbers are telling me on a regular basis.
David:
[8:06] Is that time consuming to get those reports or is that something that the owners could get fairly quickly like in 10-15 minutes a month
Kristy:
[8:14] It depends on it most of my clients I do all their accounting as well and so I have a team that helps keep up with their monthly bookkeeping and when we're actually doing it we can pull the reports you know 10-15 minutes if the company that's hiring, maybe they're just doing fractional CFO work with me. A lot of times I have them give me access to their accounting software. So, then I can pull the reports and be looking at everything versus kind of waiting on somebody to get a report to me. Because that's always hard when everybody's got so many irons in the fire and you get that call, Hey, where's that report? And it's like, oh yeah, I promise I'll get it to you. And then, you know, it's a week later and they don't.
David:
[8:58] Yeah. So, I'm sure you've seen everything across the board, really good to really bad. What are some common mistakes that business owners make that you have seen?
Kristy:
[9:10] Biggest is a mixing of personal and business. And it's one of my pet peeves. And I understand it's all about the credit card points. I really do. But some people keep their personal credit card because they want points on that one. And then they have a different card for the business and they're not utilizing it as much. And then there's all these weird transactions going back and forth because you're reimbursing your personal card for a larger purchase because you wanted the points. And so that's one of the things that you need to keep business, business. You need to keep personal, personal.
Kristy:
[9:46] Another thing is how many don't take a distribution or a paycheck. You know, they're pouring all of the money back into the business, which makes sense. But then it gets to a point where the business is making money, and you need to make sure that you're paying yourself a fair wage for all the hard work you as the founder have put into it. And coming up with what does that number looks like and meeting with your CPA for tax reasons around it as well. And then I think lastly is not reviewing expenses. And I think today it's so easy because we have so many applications, $5 here, $10 here, and you forget that you have them or you forget that you bought another software that was $30 a month and it takes care of all of these little ones on the side that you could retire and not have to pay for anymore. And so that's a big thing that I do on a quarterly basis to my clients is let's go through and look at all of our expenses and are we paying double for something that we don't need anymore?
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