If you marry someone but don't get along with their mother, you have two choices. You can let this divide and potentially destroy your marriage or you can find a way to love or accept your mother-in-law. In business, accounting is like the overbearing mother-in-law. You may not want to deal with the accounting, but if you don't learn to love it or at the very least, understand it, your business will never reach its potential and could quite possibly fail.
Without having a grasp on your company's financial situation, you are flying blind. Its not enough to go through your books every year around tax time. Business owners should be reviewing their financials each month, asking questions, and striving to understand the numbers. I tell my clients that they should have the results from January by mid-February at the very latest - the quicker, the better. That way you have timely information available so you can make adjustments on how you are running your business. How else would you be able to tell that your travel costs are getting out of hand, you're paying too much in unnecessary bank fees, your clients aren't paying you timely, or you have too much inventory on hand and its sucking up your cash flow?
So why should you fall in love with accounting? If you want your business stand the test of time, you have no choice. The good news is that you can hire an accountant to help with your business's finances... but you can't hire someone to deal with your mother-in-law.
Learn more about Bonnie Forssell and her accounting practice here.
