YOUR BUSINESS
Is your business in good shape? How well does your business treat you?
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BY CHRIS PUCKRIDGE RURAL FINANCIAL COUNSELLOR, RURAL WEST WA
egetables WA recently chaired a webinar where Rural West was invited to discuss the key issues revolving around analysing the health of your business. The complete webinar is available on the vegetablesWA Facebook page and in this article, we focus on one part of the webinar where we looked at the key issues of investigating the health of your business.
Business webinar is available on the vegetablesWA Facebook page!
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WA Grower WINTER 2020
Every business is different, often there is no one rule that fits everyone, so business operators need to make their own investigations and seek their own information, but to put it in a broad picture we suggest that there are 8 key points that can help you identify if your business is in good shape or if it might need some work.
The eight points to consider if your business is healthy! 1 How well does the business present its financial information so you can understand it? Most businesses at some stage complete a tax return and their accountant will often produce a booklet titled Financial Statements or similar. As the business operator what do you do with that information? Do you flick through it and then put in the drawer and not look at it again? If so, what has to change for it to be useful? Do you consider your balance sheet important? Does it allow you to
investigate the differences between this year and last year in the expenses? Are you able to discuss the results with your accountant and focus on areas where the business can or needs to improve? Maybe your business is involved with a family trust or some other type of trust, do you really understand it? These reports are very powerful and if used correctly they can give you a lot of traction in your business and you can understand if you are really going forwards or backwards. 2 Does the business have financial benchmarks that are reviewed regularly? Your financial statements produced by your accountant are a financial benchmark allowing you to compare your business performance from one year to the next.
