Recording and Capturing your Numbers is a must do if you want to take your Business seriously.   Last week’s podcast looked at the how bookkeeping gives life to your financial and business activities – and helps you make money.

In this episode of ‘I Hate Numbers’ I am going to look at the options for keeping your financial records, the pros and cons, my thoughts and suggestion.

Your Numbers Are Your Best Business Friend

Watching paint dry, taking a cold sales call, or a poke in the eye with a sharp stick seems more enjoyable than dealing with, and recording your numbers.

Numbers make you accountable, showing you the impact of your successes and fu** ups.  To Above all, learning to love & use your numbers means you a better chance of making money, what is not to love Numbers have feelings & are the misunderstood actors that give life to your business script.

Manual v Digital Systems

Recording and Accessing your Numbers comes down to basic choices. You can either go manual, which to me is spreadsheets (electronic pen and paper) or tap into the Cloud.   Each has their pros and cons, make your decision not on how big your business is, but where you want your business to go.

Cloud Systems

In the Business Number world Cloud Accounting is the new kid on the block. Born into the NetSuite family back in 1998, its only friends were large & rich business types. Smaller businesses just pressed their noses against the Cloud Window & looked enviously in. Face forward to 2010 and then accounting on the move came about.

Your business no longer must be chained to your desk to record financial data, & gain insight into your business story.  A decade later and the cosy club of Cloud Accounting has opened its doors, and adolescent businesses rub shoulders with businesses that are older and bigger.

Good to Know

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books. You will be reading meanings.” W.E.B. Dubois.

What Next

Grab a coffee, make yourself comfortable, sit back and listen.

I love doing this podcast and sharing my love of Numbers with you.  Check out the link to subscribe and don’t miss an episode.  Help me spread that Number Love by sharing it this podcast and others with your network.

In This Episode

• Knowing the options for how to keep financial records
• 
  
• The pros and cons of Manual v Digital Systems
• 
  
• Understanding the power of Numbers
• 
  
• Developing your own Numbers confidence and decisions
• 
  
• Take more control of your numbers to help make you money, survive and thrive

Links

https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast/id1500471288

https://play.google.com/music/m/I3pvpztpjvjw6yrw2kctmtyckam?t=I_Hate_Numbers

https://open.spotify.com/show/5lKjqgbYaxnIAoTeK0zins

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast

https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business–Economics-Podcasts/I-Hate-Numbers-p1298505/

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers Podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Hi, folks. Welcome to episode n number 10 of our weekly podcast I Hate Numbers. Now, this show isn't about hating your numbers. Far from it. Numbers in your business are your best friend. They're not going to lie to you. They're going to help your business make money. They're going to help your business survive, and they're going to help your business thrive.

What I'd like you guys to get out of the show is about getting a bit closer to your numbers and turning your energies into something more productive. Turning your energies, not to make a hobby, but to turn that business to sustain you, give you the lifestyle that you deserve, and for you to make an impact not only today, but in future years to come.

A definite virtual high five from me if you share the broadcast with your network, and obviously, a double high five if you give it a review, but I won't be greedy. Either one of those will be good enough for me. Well, let's get on with the show. Now, in this week's podcast, I'm going to be looking at options, and life always gives us options, for keeping your financial records,

the pros and cons involved, and I'll give you my advice and suggestion at the end of the podcast what I would suggest that you do. Now, in last week's podcast, we talked about the benefits of bookkeeping. We talked about keeping a track of all those financial records. You know, those Amazon receipts, the emails that you send, people are sending receipts back to you,

invoices you send out clients, the money coming into your bank account, the money leaving your bank account. We know, fundamentally, bookkeeping, recordkeeping is one business task that you cannot and really shouldn't fully escape. Your financial transactions are going to show what you spend, what you earn, the ins and out of your bank account.

It's not just a question of keeping a note of them for the sake of it, but they actually give you power, they give you confidence, and they give you the ability to navigate and tell your business story in numbers as well as in words itself. And we know that in business, people with expertise and experience and evidence are going to make more profitable decisions than people with instinct, intuition, and imagination.

I'd love to take credit for that phrase, but I can't, unfortunately. Amit Kalantri came out with that, and I think that's a superb way of summing this up. We know an effective bookkeeping system will bring us immense satisfaction, power, knowledge. It'll tell us which customers are working well for us, where our money's going.

It'll make us accountable. It shows us the direction that our business needs to go into, where we're losing money. We need to know the profits that we're making, what we're losing because it sometimes does happen that we lose money. Business needs bookkeeping to give life to our financial and business activities.

Fundamentally, if we don't catch the moments from those financial transactions, then we've got no number-business stories to tell. Financial records are fundamentally the words to our story that show us how much money we're making, where the money's going, help us figure out what the financial future holds.

Now, having said all that, let's talk about this week about how do we actually do it? What's the systems that we should be having and we are looking at, and I'm going to explore and discuss three main ones that people tend to actually look at. There's paper, and paper is a fantastic way to keep records of what you're spending, what goes on,

and I've seen people still use paper records. For me, the plus points are there's relatively little costs involved. Number two, it's easy to access. The security is quite top notch because as long as you keep your paper records secured somewhere, not near coffee cups, not somewhere where people can access them, they're pretty secure.

The cons are, it's the information that you extract. So, for me, keeping the records, that's the engine, and it's about the ability to actually say, you know, with pretty rapid time, how much am I making? How much money am I expecting to make? What does that look like against any milestones that I've set myself? Which customers are actually proving to be profitable, which ones are proving to be a drain of resources. When I've got to do my accounts, my returns for the authorities,

my accounts that I want to produce myself, if I want that information relatively quickly, which I would certainly recommend, then paper records are going to let yourself down. The next most popular method I would say that people look at is spreadsheets. Now, spreadsheets are beautiful. Spreadsheets are a part of their finance person's DNA, and they have a superb role to play in a business.

However, the plus points are, it's something we're familiar with. So, the software that captures and recalls those numbers, there's lots of free open-source systems out there. We can structure those things, we can keep those records here, and it's relatively accessible, relatively straightforward to do, and who doesn't love a good spreadsheet?

The plus points are we can produce nice pictures, visuals with that. Now, the downside is spreadsheets as every time you have a human being involved in the process, spreadsheets can have errors in them. Secondly, they're quite limiting in what they can actually do. You can develop them to be quite effective, quite good here.

But I would suggest in terms of capturing data, integrating with things like your website apps, the different ways that people pay you effectively the spreadsheet, unless you're going to be really sort of rock solid on programming, then it is going to, spreadsheet is not really going to be fit for purpose. In terms of telling you what's going on in your business, whether you're a small acorn business or a large business here, spreadsheets are limited here.

If you have no interest in seeing what's going on on a regular basis, and by regular I mean weekly or monthly, then maybe spreadsheets are for you. If you want to actually bring power, numbers that go to your business, then spreadsheets, I would suggest, are not completely redundant, but in terms of record-keeping, keeping a track of what's going on in your business financially, they're very limited in their scope.

So, what's the third option? We've talked about paper. We've talked about spreadsheets. For me, there's something now, certainly in the last 10 years that have come into fruition to make it very accessible for those small acorn businesses, and by small acorn, we all start our life as small acorns. I started my own business over 25 years ago for my back bedroom.

Nothing wrong with that. Our businesses grow here. Our demands become much more as a result, and cloud or digital accounting for me is the new kid on the block that deserves some degree of respect. Think of it like spreadsheet on steroids. Now, the advantage of a cloud system, and there are cons, there are things that we need to consider for that

,

effectively, it will save time. So, the actual entering the what we're spending, what's coming in and out of the bank account can be automated, can be plugged in. There's no more what I call tedious data entry, and you can use your most powerful computer possibly these days, your phone, and your phone can double up as a member of your accounts team.

Cloud accounting does, effectively, power lifting o of record-keeping. Process can be automated. Things called bank fees. That sounds very glamorous, doesn't it? Well, basically, your bank transactions can be automatically imported into your cloud digital system. Paper does a vanishing act, so you can scan, take pictures with your phone.

You can keep those records. And if you want to avoid having drawers full of paper, then cloud accounting is definitely the way to go forward. It can also integrate with other IT systems that you might have going on. So, if you've got a website and you're selling things off your website, then you can connect it.

If you've got PayPal, if you've got other sort of applications going on where there's some data that's being captured, then you can capture those within your cloud and accounting system. You've got live financial information. For me, what goes into your system, the capturing of those underlying records here, the power for all businesses,

the power for your business to take it further forward, to know what's going on, to make it accountable, to actually squeeze the information, to have it at your fingertips, cloud accounting gives you powerful reports. It can tell you what you're making. It can also tell you which customers are the more profitable, which ones are not.

You can see your bank balances. At a touch of a button, you can have a dashboard. So, think about driving your car and on your dashboard of your car you can see things like how much fuel is in the tank. You can see the speed at which you're traveling. Then, your accounting system, your cloud accounting system has a similar thing.

You can see who owes you money, what bills you've got outstanding. You can see your performance against milestones that you set yourselves. Who owes what to who? And all information can be drilled down to analyze what's going on in your business. In future podcast episodes, I'm going to talk to you about how you use that information to actually navigate and power your own business.

But for me, it's real-time information. It's the new way forward for any business, whatever the size, and it makes no difference to me whether your business is a private company, a social-enterprise company, a charity organisation, information is gold and absolutely essential to run your organisation. Now, you may be thinking, oh, well there's a cost involved.

There's a cost involved in anything here. And for me, I would look at it as in terms of investing. You invest a sum of money to actually build a system, have a system, keep it going, but the benefits that you'll get back will more than outweigh the cost of the initial investment. In terms of time savings, in terms of what that information is worth

your business is not incalculable, but it's really important here. I'm going to quote you something else by Paul Samuelson, says - investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow. If you want excitement, take $800 and go to Las Vegas. Now, a beautiful thing about cloud accounting is there are versions and price points to suit the range of business shapes, sizes, and complexity.

So, if I had to put my neck on the line, if I had to give a preference, I would certainly recommend cloud accounting for whatever size of your business is. If you're a freelancer, if you're just starting up your business, start as you mean to go on. These systems can always be upscaled, upgraded. Cloud accounting is the way to go for your business there as well.

If you are not worried and you just want to have a business, which is great, that it has a lifestyle, ticks over, you're not really worried about growing it, you're not really worried about making it more efficient, you're not that worried about making yourself accountable and your numbers to tell you what's going on,

then ignore cloud accounting and spreadsheets are perfectly fine. Don't abandon your spreadsheets, by the way, because the cloud accounting can integrate with them and send you beautiful reports. So, my advice, everybody, is cloud accounting is the way to go. In next week's podcast I'm going to talk to you about once you make that decision, if that's the way you want to go forward, how do we make a transfer from an existing system that we have into a new era of cloud accounting?

If you've not got one before, if you've not really got a system, you're just starting off your business journey, then obviously the transformation doesn't really exist. It's just a question of getting used to what's in front of you. But if you are making a transformation, I'm going to guide you through how you make those choices itself.

Guys, thank you very much for sharing with me your ear lobes today. Hope you got some value from the show. And if you got some value from the show, I'd love it, I'm not going to be embarrassed if you could give it a thumbs up. Share it with your network, give it a thumbs up, subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode, and in next week's episode, we're going to talk about making that move from paper or spreadsheets or nothing into the world of cloud accounting.

Have a great week, guys. Ciao. We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show. We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.