Join Strata-G-Tax’s Nicholas Coburn and Synder’s Melissa Williams for an insightful webinar on “How to Leverage QuickBooks Reports for Strategic Business Decisions”
Elevate your financial acumen and take your business to new heights. Whether you’re a small business owner or financial professional, this webinar will equip you with valuable tools for success.
You can link out to the recording of the webinar or read the full transcript here!
Unlock the power of QuickBooks reports to drive your business forward! Learn to:
➡️Navigate key reports
➡️Analyze financial data effectively
➡️ Make informed business decisions
➡️Optimize your financial strategy
Click the linkbutton below for the full recording of our webinar and the PowerPoint Presentation:
Transcript: Introduction By Mellissa Williams
Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of our Synder webinars. Today we are going to be talking about how to leverage QuickBooks reports for strategic business decisions. And we have a special guest with us today, Nicholas Coburn. We’ll introduce him in just a minute, but as people are filling into the room, we’d love it if you could go ahead and put in the chat where you’re calling in from today and perhaps something that you are excited to learn about during this webinar.
And just to let everyone know, we will be having a time for q and a if you’ve not done q and a on a Zoom webinar before. If you look down at the bottom of your screen, there’s a little conversation bubble with a question mark. It says q and a, and that’s where you can put all your questions. You’re welcome to put your name with the question or you can even select to do an anonymous question if you’d like to, to stay anonymous there. Either way, we will get to your question during the webinar, either at an appropriate time in the middle, or we will have a time at the end as well for questions.
So, all right, we have someone joining us from South Africa today. Welcome. I will go ahead and add my location as well.
Please everyone who’s just joining, I see we’re getting more people filling up in the room here. We are just putting in the chat where we are joining from today. And then if you feel like it, you can also put something that you are excited to learn about. We’ll get started at three minutes after the hour with our presentation. Oh hey, another person from California welcome.
So, a North Carolina. We’ve got a good group today. I know we have more people joining, so we’ll give them all a minute to to get here in the room before we officially kick off our presentation and I introduce you to our speaker. As always, those of you who’ve joined us before know we will be recording this webinar so you will have access to a recording at the end. And of course, we encourage you to stick around till the very end so that we can answer any questions you might have that come up. So, one more minute and then we will go ahead and get started.
I see we have a couple new people that just joined. So just to let everyone know one last time, you can add your questions at the bottom of the Zoom chat, you’ll see there’s a, a conversation bubble with a question mark. That’s where we will be taking questions today. You can stay anonymous or add your name either and we will kick off here in just a few seconds. If anyone else would like to put their location in the chat, we’d love to know where you’re joining us from today.
Alright, it is officially three minutes after the hour, so we are going to kick it off. So, I’m excited today to present this topic along with our special guest, Nicholas Coburn. Let me tell you a little bit about him. Nicholas is a CPA and holds a bachelor’s degree in commerce from the University of Ottawa. And he is the founder and president of his own tax and accounting firm strategy. Nicholas has over 19 years of experience providing financial management and oversight tax accounting, payroll and business advisory services to corporations and nonprofit organizations in both the US and Canada. He has gained his experience working with the government of Canada directly in the industry and he provided his services with a big four accounting firm before he established strategy.
Melissa Williams:
Thank you so much Nicholas. Welcome. We’re excited to have you today.
Nicholas Coborn:
Thank you so much Melissa. It’s such an honor to, to be here and be able to share and to do this webinar. It’s definitely near and dear to my heart. When we started set out on this venture five years ago now with our own firm and how strategy came to be, that strategy is referenced to cloud. So, cloud technology. So, using QuickBooks and providing these types of services online and all the, value that they add is absolutely near and dear to my heart. So I’m glad to be able to be here today.
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Melissa Williams:
Amazing. Well thank you. We’re so glad you’re here and we’ll go ahead and let’s kick it off. I know you have a presentation for us today if you want to bring that on up and as we’re getting the presentation up, just one more quick reminder, please feel free to ask your questions throughout. We’ll get to them, we’ll have a time at the end for questions, but of course if something pressing comes up, we can always take it a little earlier. So yes, if you’re here today, you are here for leveraging QuickBooks reports for strategic business decisions. And let’s go ahead and jump to the next slide and dive right in. Okay, so my first question is, what are the essential QuickBook reports that every business owner should regularly review?
Nicholas Coborn:
Yeah, absolutely. There’s six really that I, I would want to make sure that I’m reviewing on a monthly basis at a minimum. The first being the balance sheet. So we’re going to be looking at some of the, the main, main financial reports that we use. But the balance sheet is the report of assets, liabilities at any point in time. But it is like the, the life story, kind of like a yearbook where it has all the good memories and the bad memories and everything in between. But it is the history of your business. That’s where you’re going to see it on the balance sheet. The other one being for sure is the profit and loss statement.
That is a summary of your revenues, costs and expenses. It is a point in time. So if you’re looking at a monthly p and l, you’re just looking at that month, you’re not looking at the history, you’re looking at a fiscal period, you’re definitely looking at the full full year.
But it is a point in time report seeing how ultimately the net income and profitability of the business cashflow statement. So for a lot of businesses, they might do accrual accounting. So typically, where you’re looking at a balance sheet and profit and loss, there’s some manipulation that can be done in a good way through accounting in terms of deferrals and accruals and what have you. So you can sort of lose the cash flow story. So that is definitely where you want to have a cash flow statement in there where you’re looking at your cash flow generated from operating activities, investing financing, it is the tracking of inflow and outflow of cash.
You’re consistently running a negative cash flow, that means you’re losing money. So you definitely want to make sure that you are looking at the cash flow statement to see, you know, as things are coming up that you have cash ready to, to meet those obligations.
The next two really go hand in hand. They are your accounts receivable and your accounts payable, aging accounts receivable is where you have customer open invoices that haven’t been paid. You want to be regularly looking at that, see which ones are, you know, getting beyond the 30 day net terms or maybe you have shorter terms. You want to make sure that you’re staying on top of that so that the accounts receivable isn’t just growing and you’re not collecting it. Conversely, on accounts payable, those are your open invoices that you have not paid your vendors. So you want to make sure not only that things aren’t being stale, dated and possibly putting you in bad books with your vendors, but sometimes looking at these reports you actually see that you have duplication, something was paid, you’re sure it was paid.
And when you look at this report you can see okay, that’s still outstanding, why is that?
So it’s important to be looking at that to make sure that you’re not double booking expenses. And then budget’s actual, I feel like this is the ho hum, no one wants to do a budget, but it is so important as you’re plan out your year that you try your best to get a good budget in place and then regularly review it. You know, identify, especially as you’re growing or anticipating a new project down the road, you want to see why is, you know, our revenue not where products and services, not where we thought they would be or why are expenses ballooning based on where we thought we’d be at this point.
So definitely a good idea, if not monthly, at least quarterly, to sort of track how are we doing against our budget to see like opportunities and, and threats. Amazing. So those are the six.
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Melissa Williams:
Awesome. Thank you so much. So let’s take a little look more at like profit and loss. How can business owners navigate that profit and loss report to identify financial trends and opportunities for growth?
Nicholas Coborn:
Yeah, absolutely, I would for sure. And we’re going to talk about momentarily. The first thing I would do is comparative, you want to make sure that you’re looking not just that one column of totals, but we’re going to talk about that a little bit later. So the next thing I would for sure want to make sure I’m utilizing, especially when we’re talking about QuickBooks, are we using projects, locations, classes, tags to really be able to track So projects for instance, you’re able to, the example that I gave here is, you know, a builder or contractor, maybe they have, you know, commercial projects, maybe they have residential homes that they’re building.
You want to be able to see your revenue, your expenses, your labor for those projects and really get a good understanding because typically when you’re looking at, okay, if you think of commercial, a lot of people say you know, that’s where the good money is.
But when you think about the timeline of that commercial projects, the labor, maybe if it’s commercial, you talk about multiple cities or you need to go build a drugstore in multiple cities and you’re sending people on location, there’s cost overrun. Meanwhile, in the residential side, maybe actually you learn that if you’ve done three homes or a much shorter period of time, there is a lot more profitability there. So instead of trying to bid someone for the commercial job, you’re able to really track in QuickBooks that you know, actually these projects are more profitable and we need to focus our attention there.
Same thing for locations, that’s typically if you have multiple sites or divisions, you want to be making sure that you’re tracking the profitability. because maybe it’s the case that you, again, you’re just looking at that final column at the end of the year and it’s profitable.
Maybe if you look at locations, there’s one that’s not, maybe there’s, you know, over capacity or under utilization of your employment. And so it’s inefficient. Again, if you’re making good use of these tracking tools, you’re really able to start to see, okay, where are the trends? Where do we need to make changes? And ultimately what’s working really well and how can we exploit it further?
Melissa Williams:
Great. Okay, great. So what steps do you recommend a business owner take to set up custom reports and QuickBooks that will meet their specific needs?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, so I’m just going to bring over just the sample company QuickBooks online. This is a great question because when, when I heard that it was coming, it was a a good time to just reflect at my own issues with doing customer reports. So a lot of times we’re going in, we need to pull out data for a customer and then all of a sudden we run the report and then exited QuickBooks and it’s they go shoot, you know it’s an audit or whatnot and you had to go back and so then you’re redoing the same thing, the amount of time that that’s taken. So in QuickBooks Handy tool, literally every statement, every report that that’s in here has this custom and save customization up here.
So if you’re looking at your data, maybe you want to do a this year to last month. because the value of this is that you do this once and you save it and then you’re taking care of your bookkeeping.
These reports are automatically updating, you’re not even coming in here so you can go change your period. You can come in here maybe there’s certain things you want to customize in terms of maybe you’re just looking at a customer and this is a sample entity so it doesn’t have everything in here. But if you’re using projects or locations, again these are going to be more options to filter. So you, you’re just looking maybe at a certain branch that you want to take a look at. So once you feel good and confident that you’ve got everything that you want to look at, you’ve run your report, now you’re just saving it so easy is just, so this is a year to date last month and we’re going to save it. So you can create a group, maybe you want to, so two options here you maybe there’s a group like of financials that you just want to save so that you’re looking on a monthly basis or annual basis, maybe you want to share it with everyone so they can see it.
Like if you added an accountant to this, you could share it so that everyone sees it including your accountant or it’s just you. So once you pick those and you’ve saved it, now this report literally is going to populate itself every month. You don’t need to come in here and do this again, easy as going back, looking at your, so this is reports standard now you’ve got your custom and you can see here, here’s your custom reports and this is the one that we just, just just created.
The other advantage of the custom is that you can actually set it up, that you email it. Wow. So that you could set it up so that each month on the 10th day that gives you a little time to make sure things are up to date. because you wouldn’t necessarily want to be emailing yourself, it’s not not complete reports but you can set up this report and send it to yourself or someone else or a manager or whatnot that you want to take a look and set this up on a schedule that it just populates.
Definitely want to make sure that you have your books up to date before you’re setting up something like that. But again, that’s literally the one example I’m thinking of. I worked, did do work with a youth theater program and they often wanted to know the seats, were they selling out their seats or in terms of the profitability and revenue generated. And I made a mistake of running a report and exiting and then all of a sudden the sales were just coming in integrated fantastic. But I didn’t have that report so I had to rebuild it I think three times before I realized that if I just built a customer port, it’s just there and then it’s literally a matter of I can just go in the integration’s working, everything’s being booked, I can just email that report that’s already completed and see it right away. So definitely something that you want to take a look at and easy to put together in QuickBooks.
Melissa Williams:
Yeah, thank you for showing us that. That was really cool. I can see that being a huge time saver for, for business owners. So looking at comparative reports now, how can businesses use comparative reports in QuickBooks to track performance over time?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, this is, this is so important. because again, it’s, it’s so easy. Like the typical, and sorry if there’s accountants on the, on the, on the phone, it’s so easy in the historical model for like the accountant to say at your end like how is business? And then you’re in your head you’re thinking, well I think it was okay, it was good. And it’s like, I don’t know. And then you give your financial data in a few year, few months after your end. So here’s your financial statements and maybe six to 10 months after your end here’s your your tax return. And it’s not really to that point that you maybe have any idea how was your actual business or you know, your profit or not.
And there there’s QuickBooks that allows you to literally each month be able to not only see how you did that month, but in real time you’re seeing, okay, how do we do this month?
Compare it, run, run your p and l, not just look at the final final totals but look at the whole month, look at the whole quarter and then compare it to the previous quarter, compare it to the previous year and start to see like where do we have seasonality or, or cycles in our, our profits. So the example here is like if you had a youth counseling service, there’s a good chance that your revenues are going to dip in the summertime when when students are not in school and maybe are taking a break.
And so all of a sudden you’re trying to think, okay, from a cashflow standpoint, if we just looked at total, we have no idea that maybe the summer months is not when we want to make capital acquisitions or or necessarily hire new staff because there’s, that is our down season. So if you’re just looking at the year end totals or when you get your tax return, this is how we did, you’re not really going to be able to make any good plans throughout the year or see the trends.
So similarly we’re using there the, the retailers obviously as you get towards the end of the year and Christmas and different holidays that have those events, Thanksgiving there’s an uptake in retail. So you want to be able to see when are those periods of high demand, when do we need to have Black Friday sales or other sales? And then when, when do we need to think about selling off inventory and getting ready for the new season? So definitely running comparative transactions, it’s as easy as we saw there. We could see run a report of this year last month, but then we could easily select months and quarters to be able to, to review all the prior data and compare it.
Melissa Williams:
Awesome. Great, thank you. So now let’s talk a little bit about expense reports. What would you say businesses should look for when analyzing their expense reports to reduce costs and improve profitability?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, I, my go-to especially working with not-for-profits is that everyone, whether you profit or not should review your expenses. Like you are a not-for-profit. So make a habit of re reviewing that budget to actual see when you maybe have quarters or months that are going to be in, in significant expense season or when revenue’s going to dip.
The example I gave here is like in working with an not-for-profit, we often say you’d have grant funding coming in, you’d have registrations coming in and then they’d need to run a summer camp. And then you’re looking at the summer and you’re thinking, yes, like we’re going to make it, cash is going to make it. And then all of a sudden the question is, well wait a second, what about that first payroll in September? And then you get all sorts of brainstorming going on and it’s like, well you know, we’ll have some registrations coming in and, and maybe we can use those for the summer camp.
And it’s like, no, no, no, you don’t want to be into to those revenue dollars in the summer months. You really want to make sure that like if you’re doing an assessment and there’s a good chance that you’re in a low season of cash flow, that you’re doing that time to analysis. You know, maybe it’s not a season where we can add new computers or a new equipment. We need to push that off to the end of the fall because we know that’s when the, you know, revenue’s going to pick up. So my advice is always be thinking what’s around the corner. Don’t be placent with do like your expenses for accountants.
This is specifically true I find is that we just like, we have lots of dues and subscriptions and we have software and we have search engines and all that kind of stuff that we need to keep up to date and you just keep paying it and it auto renews and you just pay the bill.
Sometimes those expenses can, you’re paying for, for software licenses that you no longer are using or you know, customers aren’t using and you just, it’s part of that annual renewal and then you’re realizing that yeah you’ve paid it for another season. So you want to make sure that you really get a good understanding of of your expenses, not just letting things go by. You want to take a look at simple things like repair and maintenance. That’s another easy one where you’re looking at it and you’re just thinking, okay, it’s repair and maintenance. Well if there’s significant capital or renovations that have been done, those maybe should be a balance sheet item.
And so you can manage your expenses that way where you don’t have such a huge hit. One thing I want to also express, do not become a victim of ebitda. Often if I’m talking to someone, maybe they’re just want to know like what’s our ebitda?
So I like to say it in full so we get a true understanding of what that is. So that ebitda, if you hear someone ask you about it, it’s earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortization. People that are proponents for this is that it should just be your true operations, not things that are non kind of cash items.
The example that I would give, let’s say you are a car rental company, you might have an EBITDA that is quite healthy, it’s just your revenue from rentals, it’s your, you know, your overhead and labor and your profitable. If you are skipping over the EBIT or the interest depreciation amortization, you’re probably skipping over like the millions of dollars of vehicles that you have on your balance sheet. Possibly skipping over the interest that you’re paying to finance those vehicles and quite possibly you’re actually in a loss situation or are not doing very well.
So I think it was Warren Buffet that said this management think that the tooth fairy pays for capital items in terms of he’s also not an EBITDA person. Just be careful that if you sort of saying all depreciation taxes, who cares? Those are real expenses. So you want to make sure that you are not just sort of passing over things that are coming over from the balance sheet. because realistically the car rental company is going to need to replace your vehicles, you’re going to replace your manufacturing equipment, you want to make sure that you’re staying on top of that.
Melissa Williams:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Yeah, I think that’s easy to become a victim of that. So good that you mentioned it. So what like would you say are some trends and patterns in expenses other than like, I know we talked about the maintenance costs, things like that, but what should trigger a review of spending habits or maybe vendor contracts?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, I’m a, I’m a pictures guy so any, anytime that you can like map out what your financials are doing just makes it easy. So I, we do use some software and what QuickBooks has it to and some of their advanced subscriptions where you can really see the dance that the expenses are doing with revenue and profitability. So one trend would be, let’s say you’re looking at your revenue and it doesn’t take much to just sort of map it out yourself. Especially if you’re looking monthly at your financials. If you’re seeing your revenue is sort of all stagnating or going up a little bit, but then you’re looking at your cost of goods sold for instance and it’s a little bit of a rollercoaster but then it swings up and now your cost of goods sold is going above your revenue line.
I mean that that right there is showing that your, your revenue and your pricing possibly is not staying ahead of maybe inflation adjustments that your vendors have pushed through.
So questions there would be like, you know, do we need to think of other vendors in terms of determining whether the price is too high? Do we need to make sure from a pricing standpoint that our revenue is in sync? Do we have under utilization of staff or we have high labor and direct costs that is not comp or matching the revenue. Do we have finished goods inventory that is not moving and is is sort of just stagnating but we’re paying, you know, paying those costs. So that’s really where you, again going back to that comparative example, you want to look monthly, what are our revenue doing?
What is the dance that it’s doing with the expenses? If the lines are kind of crossing over going that, you know, that means quite possibly that your expenses are too high. Similarly you, you’re looking for some one offs too.
Like if you’re looking monthly in your expense column is relatively what you think it should be, but then all of a sudden there’s this huge repair maintenance or or a huge uptake in labor, you want to ex explore those. I think we’re going to discuss that a little bit later. But you know those may be aren’t just accounting items, those could be things that are essentially fraudulent or bad accounting or duplications even not necessarily fraud. It could just be that the entries in there twice. So looking at the trend of expenses, you’re looking for one offs, you’re looking for where your cost of goods sold makes no sense compared to profitability and and revenue to see where you need to pivot.
Melissa Williams:
Okay, thank you. That’s great. So now let’s change over to talking about the balance sheet for a minute. What are the key elements that you would say indicate a business’s financial health?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, the first one would be liquidity solvency. So does your business have the cash flow to pay its bills?
So you’re thinking of, you have your cash in terms of current assets, your cash, your accounts receivable deposits, prepaids, those types of items. So that’s kind of your, how easy can you change your assets into real cash.
So obviously cash is cash and accounts receivable should come in and, and help you build up your cash. Do you have enough cash to pay your bills? So that’s where we’re going to be talking a little bit later in terms of, you know, analyzing your accounts receivable, accounts payable, what can you do to make sure that you have enough liquidity essentially to keep yourself solvent. The next would be the level of debt. So that is just how, how leveraged are you? So typically a ratio that someone would use here would be debt to equity.
So you’re just adding up your debt and comparing it to your equity. Equity usually is being populated by what you know, investment that your shareholders put into the company. What profits over time have you built up. So if you have a one-to-one that’s essentially saying, you know, you’re basically for every dollar of of of debt that you’ve taken on, you’re reinvesting a dollar of equity into the business. That would be a healthy for sure a healthy ratio. Two to one’s also acceptable. But what that would mean is that you’ve got $2 of debt for every dollar of equity. So depending on what season you’re in, maybe it’s a high investment, you know, return on future investment. So you need to make some, some acquisitions today that’s going to require you to have some financing that might push up your debt to equity. If that’s the case, that’s, that’s totally healthy.
If your debt equity is two to one and you’re just doing it because you need to pay the bills and break even, that would be a huge warning sign. So you want to definitely make sure that you’re looking at your, your level of debt and what is being used for. And then you’re looking for growth potential. So again, what accounts are increasing, decreasing, staying the same, the accounts receivable as an example is increasing. That could be good, that means you’re making sales but if it’s staying high and just increasing that quickly turns to a negative because that means you’re not collecting. So then that turns into a new issue of how do we get those dollars actually paid. Same for accounts payable.
I mean if it’s increasing, that potentially is okay as long as you’re within your credit or your terms or you’ve, you know, negotiated and discussed with your vendors that you need some more time. But realistically if it’s increasing it means you’re getting behind on your, on your bills so that that’s a warning sign.
But similarly, like if you are, let’s say you do have a big investment coming up and you need to go to the bank, you want to make sure that you’re showing a healthy balance sheet so the more liquid you are, the lower your debt equity ratio. Those are really opportunities that the bank’s going to see as a, an opportunity to lend financing. So you want to make sure that balance sheet looks as healthy as possible.
Melissa Williams:
Okay, great. We did get a question from the audience that I think makes sense to go ahead and answer. Now if you don’t mind, which persons or persons in the company should be analyzing these reports? Are they able to understand what they’re seeing? Do they truly understand finance? Who do you recommend within a company is looking at these?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, I mean absolutely depending on the size. I mean if you’re a large company, hopefully you do have a finance team or someone on board that can sort of help make sense of the numbers.
Ultimately, let’s say if, if you’re large or maybe you don’t necessarily have a finance team you’re looking at, your management should be in a position, especially if you’re making use of let’s say projects and locations in something like QuickBooks where you’re able to say like this is how our business is using, they would have the best oversight to say okay, here is our profit and loss for our division. Why is labor so high compared to revenue? I mean some of those are, that’s, that’s why I don’t necessarily always want to talk about ratios even though the next next slide has some ratios on it. It shouldn’t be complex that someone has to, you know, calculate days, inventory, turnover and all that.
You should just be able to say quite past easily, here is our division, if you’re a manager, this is ultimately what our budget was. We’re underperforming like the doll. Like the picture shows us that what we thought was going to come through is much higher than what is actually happening. Why is that? The next thing would be like what’s our inventory? Why is our finished goods not moving?
So those are I think some questions that if it’s, if it is retail or manufacturing, I would say a manager should be in a position that they can at least look at the data to say like why are, why are the numbers dictating what they are? If it’s labor’s too high and revenue’s low, that means you have an unproductive labor force. That doesn’t mean they’re lazy, it probably just means that they’re underutilized. So is there an opportunity to redeploy some of that staff to another division?
For the really small business I would, you know, shout out to accountants or bookkeepers out there, you should have someone that’s ultimately not just bookkeeping but also providing account like accounting in terms of might take someone’s book at the end of the year and there’s this whole whack of ask my accountant. That’s almost my biggest pet peeve is that there’s an account in QuickBooks and all software that says ask my accountant. because things can just pile up there. So you want to make sure that things are being taken care of throughout the year. So if it is a case, QuickBooks and all the tools that are in it definitely should reduce the cost associated with having an out, like an outsourced provider provide that service. So it shouldn’t be cumbersome and actually one, I think I had talked about it at the end, if you have an advanced subscription in QuickBooks or you’re an accountant, you have access to what’s called performance center.
And that performance center literally will just export if your books are up to date. Everything that I’m talked about today in terms of aging, aging comparative data, comparing sales pictures that I love your ratios that are important in terms of determining whether you’re liquid or not and they’ll self populate. So for sure, especially if you don’t have an advanced subscription, reach out to the accountant that’s on your file to say like look, I know that that report exists. They may be not necessarily going to walk you through and do a full analysis for you, but it’s there.
Just ask for it because it’s such an important tool that you can, whether you’re financially literate or not, you can see again the pictures. What does it say if revenue is going below the expense line, something needs to change. If your expenses are way above what you budgeted, you need to just ask why.
And then it’s a matter of what is the expense, why is it higher? So really it doesn’t have, you don’t have to be an accountant to figure it out. A lot of this stuff, the numbers speak for themselves but I would say that yeah, if you’re a small entity you probably just want to have an accountant doing your bookkeeping for you so that they, these reports are, excuse me, are are there like QuickBooks is generated in the background as long as you know, bank feeds are in there. So I would say small, have an accountant assist you, a larger entity, you your management should have access that they can really get down to look at their specific p and ls and and be able to explain to top management or the owners what’s going on.
Melissa Williams:
Okay, great. Thank you so much. Hopefully that answered your question. Let us know in the chat if you have any follow up questions. We’re happy to get to those. One more thing about the balance sheet. What would you say are like maybe just a few key financial indicators to help someone decide whether they should seek additional funding or cut expenses?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, for me I keep it super simple. I’m looking at working capital. So working capital is your current assets over current liabilities. Again, can you meet your short term obligations, payroll interest, your bills. So that too is where banks, so if you’re thinking of seeking financing for financ again for a significant investment, you know you’re, you’re upgrading your building, you’re going to be hiring staff because you have a new product line, you want to make sure that you’re going to the bank when you’re working. Capital paints a good story. So what does that mean? So working capital is current assets.
Maya’s liabilities is the current ratio is just dividing those two amounts. And then a quick ratio is sort of getting inventory outta the way because it’s usually the least liquid asset. So what is your current assets minus inventory divided by current liabilities. Looking at these amount ratios one-to-one means that you are just, just scraping by.
You’re just meeting your short-term obligations. If you go to the bank at a one-to-one ratio, it’s probably going to be tough to get financing. Also, if you’re going the bank at a one-to-one ratio to get financing, it’s not a good story because it means you’re bringing in more debt just to break even. So that would definitely be a situation where I’m saying okay, we need to cut costs and treating it like a not-for-profit. If we’re one-to-one, something’s gotta go or you need to, it’s not a season right now that we can be, you know, acquiring new computers or hiring as you get closer to two to one, that’s a phenomenal ratio.
That means like you’re able to meet all your obligations plus that whole extra dollar for every dollar of expense to reinvest in the business. So closer to two to one is very healthy. If, if that was the case and you’re looking at you’re able to easily meet your, your debt obligations and you’re looking at expanding or doing something significant for your business, that is the time for sure that you want to go to the bank and explore financing because both these are the ratios that they’re going to be looking at to do a risk assessment and you know, more liquid that you are ease the ease of paying your short-term payables, there’s going to result in in them extending you more financing for what you’re looking at.
Melissa Williams:
Great. Okay. Awesome. So now let’s talk a little bit about profit and loss. Let’s talk about some red flags. So what are some of those common red flags that someone could find in their profit and loss report that might signal the need for immediate business attention?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, so I don’t want to scare people by saying things like net margin, net profit margin, some of these things are count in terms of finance terms, it’s really just easy. So net profit like your, your net income is you are looking at your profit and loss statement. Bottom line, you then to get the margin, you’re just dividing your bottom line by revenue. So the example here being, let’s say you’re a huge like company and you see a hundred million dollars as your net profit, like we’re all thinking fantastic wish I was that entity. They’re doing phenomenally well. However, if you then divide your net profit by revenue and it’s 1%, that means that literally any inflation adjustment to your expenses, any additional, you know, hiring someone interest rates are going like going up something that would significantly add more than a percent of expense.
You’re now a loss at income. So even though you’ve got a hundred million dollars of net profits there in the base, it not is not necessarily a good good sign. It’s actually a red flag if, if you divide it by revenue and it’s 1%, that means your expenses are essentially the same and one little, you know, you increase your labor by inflation adjustment, you’re probably going to eat up most of that 1%. If not go the other way. So that would be the one thing that I look at. Don’t just get swayed by the fact that you’re in the block, divide that black number by by revenue and see like how, you know, how profitable are we? That would be the first one. The next one would be declining profitability.
So big example here is especially for startups, you know when you’re tight on cash and you don’t necessarily want to spend on marketing, but quite often marketing and sales go hand in hand or they should.
So if you see for instance you’re looking at profits are going down but your marketing spends going down and your sales also dipped at the same time, that would be a red flag. That might mean that we need to start increasing our spending on, on campaigns changes to vendor pricing. So quite often you get those emails that, hey we’re raising our prices, that is something you want to stay on top of. And again, don’t just take it for granted that, okay well our prices are going up. Maybe it’s a case that we need to explore whether there are, you know, better price alternatives out there, productivity issues, we, I’ve sort of mentioned that, but you want to look at, you know, if your labor’s really high or it’s staying at a level but your revenue’s lining, you want to see like do you again, especially if you have multiple locations, you want to make sure is there labor at the east wing, like are they over or underutilized?
Like is there, if we have another division, are they kind of overutilized and not able to meet all the demand? Can we move something over to make sure that our, our workforce is, you know, fully utilized and not under over capacity if inventory’s and low demand, so you have finished goods that are sitting there that that’s, that’s a red flag we need to pivot. I think one, one example comes to mind is Lululemon for instance. The often see where they’ve just pulled a whole line of their leggings and you’re wondering like what America it look the expensive rolling that out, but they know from from right away that it’s, it’s not well received.
They’re not going to waste money on just, well someone will buy it. Like it’s just not moving. Get rid of it. Re-pivot.
Yeah, something nefarious. You want to make sure that you’re looking at one large off, large one-off swings if something just spikes and then there’s no real reason for it. You want to make sure that it’s not something got duplicated or that someone you know has access, especially for smaller companies or it’s tough to have segregation of duty for everyone. Someone might have multiple roles that gives them access to banking. You just want to make sure that you’re staying on top of any large swings.
And the third is disproportionate expenses. So you might ask why is that any different with decline profitability? It could be a case marketing as example where you actually want to increase your expense. But where it’s disproportionate, again, that’s the dance. Maybe the cost of goods have sold is doing with revenue where your revenue is at one level but your cost of goods sold is going through the roof.
Again, you want to assess is this inflation have we need to, do we need to change our pricing? You know, are we staying up with the inflation adjustment that everyone else is passing through wages we’ve talked about, again, you want to just see is, is is the amount that you’re paying for labor actually correlate to the revenue that you’re bringing in?
Also you want to look at capital items and do you have capital items that are being expensed that are making your p and l like way too high in terms of current expenses when real realistically they should be on the balance sheet and expense over time.
Melissa Williams:
Great. Okay, great. Thank you so much. These are really good. So yeah, definitely some things to, to keep in mind. Let’s jump over to talking a bit about sales reports. What would you say are the signals that suggest changes need to be made to either a sales or pricing st strategy?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, so pictures again, if your sales and profitability look like that, so less than sign or fish lips, that’s often a big indicator that if your revenue’s going up you think, oh this is fantastic. But if your profitability is going down, again, it goes back to the last slide you possibly have, you know, your expenses are disproportionate to your revenue, you might need to reassess not just inflation. I mean that’s a big hot topic because you don’t necessarily want to overreact. Like if, if you have a value add product and you’re adding that value to your product, your your product should be price accordingly and it should be able to absorb certain inflation distance.
Obviously we went through a season of high inflation that’s going to bump a lot of prices up. But you shouldn’t necessarily be the entity that every single year you need to bump up your price for inflation. You should, if you have a value add product, you should be able to price it. because people want it, it’s in demand and the value of that should correspond with not only the value that’s been added, but a you know, a, a healthy margin so that you can absorb ebbs and flows with what your vendors are doing.
You want to assess, so I just sort of gave this example, you want to assess your finished goods inventory if it result, if you have to do heavy discounts to move your products, stop, like it’s not something you want to be investing in. So as a little 11 example, if your leggings aren’t selling, that’s not like stop putting money into it. Like if you have to give a discount to sell something, I mean there’s seasons for that. You want to get rid of inventory, that’s one thing. But if you’re just needing a dis heavy discount just to move your your new product, you need to pivot and then benchmark your prices.
So the one example I have is, is back in the contract space, there’s a gentleman that was offering his services and he picked a price that he thought was fair, but in his city he was a third of what everyone else was charging. So you want to make sure that that is not you, you want to make sure that if what you’re giving or the value that you’re providing to your community or what your product service, it’s aligned with what a competitor is, is doing.
Yeah, again, you’re measuring the value add. How do you differentiate? Like if you’re selling widgets, they might all look the same. If you’re the widget with, you know, the able to put bluey on the cover and sell it to, you know, a demographic of of preschools you might have the upper hand. So are you adding value to what you’re producing that should price you higher than the the competition. And at the end of the day, there’s no prize for holding a title of cheapest price. And that kind ofactually brings me into the next category as an example is not all revenue is good revenue. If you’re a small supplier and you’re trying to compete with the big box stores on pricing, it’s, it’s not going to happen. And, and realistically even in this season, I mean prices are high, I don’t want to sound cavalier attitude, but typically even in like if you go to buy something, usually your mindset is I want to find the cheapest version.
Like you typically are wanting to buy something that has value and and cost cutting. There’s times where it’s like, yeah, just we need to get the lowest cost alternative. But typically when you’re going, whether, whether it’s the other day I was trying to shop for my wife for a birthday and she mentioned perfume, I know nothing about perfume. I had to take my daughter to help me. But I definitely didn’t just walk in and say, what is the cheapest stuff you got? Like you’re so thank goodness
You want something that’s of value and and typically you’re willing to pay for it. So, and the one example I had is actually someone that did a hobby baking and, and doing cakes and stuff and the phenomenal work, but the cost of doing these creations and fresh ingredients and delicious baking and chocolate molding and stuff, it’s a high cost of material, let alone the labor. And and the response that she got back from one customer was, well I can go to big box store and get 12, 12 cupcakes for you know, whatever, $12 or $20 or whatever and they got my son’s picture on ’em and they look great. That’s great. You’re not going to compete with the big box store.
So if someone doesn’t see the value that you’re putting into it to sell your beautiful creation for $12, like it’s, you’ve already put $30 of ingredients into it.
Like it’s, it’s a loss. So just being able to say that you got the sale, it’s not good. So don’t overextend yourself, watch your capacity. Like if you cannot meet the demand, there’s a good chance possibly that you’re not able to then meet the service that your customers are wanting. So you want to make sure that you really are focusing on what is the, again that goes back to all these reports. You want to see what is our best selling product, the highest margin. And you want to focus your efforts. If you’re a bakery, you don’t want to be a hundred items that everyone loves. You’re going to need to focus on what are our key ones that we can kind of mass produce with exceptional value but not overextend ourselves.
And it is always okay to say no. There’s a season for saying yes and a season for saying no.
Melissa Williams:
Very good. Yes. Alright. Right. So let’s talk a little bit now about the cashflow statement. How should business owners interpret that statement to ensure they have enough liquidity for future operations?
Nicholas Coborn
Yep, for sure. So again, cashflow is a measurement of your actual cash inflow and outflow is your gen, is your business generating enough cash to meet its obligations? And then some obviously you don’t want to just be breaking even. It’s comprised of three main categories. So the first being your operating activity. So this is the main thing, your day to day, your EBITDA if you will.
Ultimately if, if the outflow of cash in this situation is greater than inflow, that means that you are not generating enough your, your costs, your business is costing more than you’re able to generate revenue.
That necessarily isn’t always a bad thing that could point to that your accounts receivable is getting too high.
It’s not necessarily that your business is failing, but there could be certain things. Again, if there’s a season where you took on financing and have a high interest payable, that’s an operating. So that’s going to increase potentially the outflow from your operations.
But you definitely want to make sure that you are not paying your bills faster than you were being paid. Another example is startups.
There’s a quite a good possibility that for the first year or a couple years of a startup, you’re going to have negative cash flow. You’re building your business, it’s not necessarily alarming. You’re going to look at some of these other red flags before you get alarmed here because there is quite a significant upfront spend.
The next section is your investing activities. So if you need to replace your vehicles or you know, do a building renovation, new equipment, manufacturing or computers, this is where that’s going to fall.
So it’s definitely common in a season of investment that you’re going to be negative here. So that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it just, you don’t always want to be negative every month, but there’s definitely going to be seasons where you’re financing, that’s where you kind of are issuing bonds, getting bank debt or paying dividends to your shareholders that’s going to fall in this category. So obviously if you go out and get a bank loan, you’re going to be very positive in this category, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing if the use of the loan is for business development and growth. Fantastic. If it’s to meet the bills, not good.
Then just the other element here was just that you want to make sure that you are reviewing your on cashflow on a monthly basis. Not just looking at like the total you want to see month over month, how are we doing? Because where that ultimately what’s going to do is it’s going to help you determine whether you have seasonality in your cash, whether it’s weather dependent or, or vacation schedules. Like the, the snowplow company might not necessarily on its own be ready to buy snow plows in the summer, but if the snow plow snowplow company story has a landscaping business that’s more profitable in the summer, you know, quite possibly that is when they want to buy a snow plow because it could be on sale. So that’s where you really want to, to to, to assess on a month by month basis how your cash is going.
And I love this picture for the slide, just, I mean some of these pictures that they have are humorous, but I’m just looking at that it is like these people are super excited because they looked at their cash flow and they realize that they can have a big screen TV for their boardroom and they no longer have to like huddle around one guy’s computer.
And so that is just something that you want to make sure that you are monitoring your, your capsule. Like look at the months like, you know, August and September everyone’s on vacation we’re in, so, but September may, those, those are our big, big cash cycle. So we know we need to, especially in the spring of the year, we need to make sure that we’re managing our cash so it covers those periods of, of negative cash flow. So that’s why you definitely want to make sure that you’re reviewing on a monthly basis.
Melissa Williams:
Great. Okay. Awesome. So let’s talk a little bit about accounts receivable and the accounts receivable aging report. What actionable insights can businesses derive from that report? How does it impact decision making? And then we’ll also talk about like how can a high accounts receivable balance affect cash flow and what strategies can be used to be paid faster?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, so accounts receivable is, it’s a great tool. Again, it’s QuickBooks sets it up so you can see your, your buckets and typ once upon a time. Used to be 30 days, but sometimes now you can, especially in QuickBooks you can pick, maybe you have a seven, seven day term, typically you 15 and then you can do it by period. So things that are within that first bucket that’s just say 30 days, that means, you know, those, those, it’s common for those invoices to be not paid. People are probably using the full period that they’re allowed to pay. Things that are now going into 60 days, 90 days, 120 days.
You want to make sure that you’re assessing those.
So the insight they might give is not all revenues created equal. There is such thing as bad revenue. So kind of the example that we gave before, if cupcakes cost you $30 to make and you’re only getting 12, $12 a sale, not worth it.
But also consider the time to collect. If your people aren’t paying, your customers are taking you 60, 90 days or more to pay, think of the effort of not only collecting, but that went into selling ’em the good you want to actually assess as a business. Is it worth it to keep selling? Also, if, if accounts receivable is getting older, you want to determine maybe there’s a percentage of accounts receivable that you want to mark as a bad debt expense and that then goes on your income statement, especially your own taxes, something you want to consider. But if things are like 120 days, there’s a good chance that maybe at that point you’re writing anything older than that a hundred percent.
But maybe for some of the other buckets that are over the 30 days, you’re just putting a percentage on, you know, 5%, 3% is a risk that we’re not going to collect. So you definitely want to make sure that you’re not basically overstating your income by revenue that you’re not going to collect. It might also indicate that you need to have positive or negative encouragement, meaning those that are willing to pay early might get discounts. Those that take a very long time to pay, need to potentially have interest assessed. But the key thing here is that you definitely want to communication’s key. You want to make sure that they know ultimately that they’re especially due electronic billing and whatnot, that you, that they’re fully aware that that they received it.
And I’m sorry, I think did you ask like what actions to encourage time collection?
Melissa Williams:
Yeah, just to give people a few ideas there would be great.
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah. So I bolded this, don’t resist electronic billing. And for that I was speaking to a lot of accounts out there like the old school. But if you just started your business and got a really nice kind of, you know, invoice paper with your logo on it, frame it, put it up on the wall as a reminder of the bygone room. Make use of electronic billing, especially with like tools like QuickBooks. I mean you can, especially with the app that is associated with QuickBooks, like you can have all your products, services, all your descriptions, what you sell, all your customers, all preloaded.
And you can be on site and literally, let’s say it’s a builder again, you went there to do a quote on the app, you know, a few keystrokes on your phone. You’ve got a, a invoice or an estimate prepared that you can immediately before you leave the premises have in your client’s hands.
So you want to make use of that. The other reason is something like QuickBooks use reminders. Those are automated, you can just toggle ’em on. If your invoice becomes past due, your, or even before a few days before it comes past due, an email reminder goes out to your customer saying, Hey, your due date’s upon us, please let us, you know, please settle. So you want to make use of that. You want to view open invoices in QuickBooks because it shows whether your customer even looked at it.
So that could be going back to communication. If, if the email’s not good or just it maybe went to a spam folder, they may have no idea that they have your bill. So it’s an easy way to see if they’ve never opened it. Don’t get mad, just give ’em a call and have ’em open it.
Sometimes you need to consider having an upfront deposit. So especially if it’s a higher ticket item before you do all the work, make sure that you, you know, have a deposit that covers the expense associated. And then as I mentioned, you want to discuss potentially having discounts to expedite collection. Sometimes you want to have interest, but again, you want to make sure that you’re communicating well.
Melissa Williams:
Awesome. Great. Thank you. We have just under 10 minutes left for the webinar, so just a quick reminder, if anyone else has any questions, go ahead and throw those in the q and a at the bottom of your Zoom chat. But let’s jump on over to accounts payable. How can businesses use data from the accounts payable report to avoid late fees and maintain those healthy vendor relationships?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, so it’s pretty well complete opposite of accounts receivable, but it’s the same thing. You want to know your limits and play within them. You want to honor your terms for sure, but you want to maxim maximize to improve cash flow. So in some cases communicate with vendors if you need to extend the 30 days. But like I, I’ve definitely had examples where I’ll have, you know, where we assist a client with, with paying bills and they’ll reach out and say, you know, so and so didn’t receive their payment. And we may be like, oh my goodness, how we missed this. And then we’re like, well when did they send it?
And then like, well last night at eight 30 and you’re like, well we just sent it last night at eight 30. He doesn’t need to be paid. Right? Like right now, like what are the actual terms on the bill?
If it’s 30 days, like manage your cash flow, it does not need to be paid the next morning. So sometimes again, you want to know who your vendors are. Contractors, typically you’re paying them sort of like employees. So they’re, they’re definitely relying on being paid as soon as possible. But yeah, like make sure that if there’s terms and you’ve communicated that we maybe make two pay cycles a month or once a week, whatever it is, they’re going to wait. Okay. You don’t need to have your bills going out faster than your customers are paying. You gotta make sure if, if there are early pay discounts out there, make sure you’re using them.
I know a lot of credit cards might, might have those where if you pay early, you get, you know, a discount off, you want to definitely consider that. Make sure that if commercial pricing’s available, like I think of landscapers for instance, if if there’s out there and but buying wood and that it’s cheaper to do it as a commercial account. Make sure you’re utilizing that. But similarly you want to be reviewing your AP summaries. We just, our aging summary similarly, you want to know like what’s within 30 days, what’s getting old. It’s often not a case that something hasn’t been paid. If it’s past 30 days, that’s a good indication that you have some duplicated bills in there. So that’s a great way to just make sure that you’re staying on top of it and cleaning it up.
Melissa Williams:
Great. Amazing. Okay, so keeping QuickBooks up to date, we have talked a bit about why you should do that and the importance. Are there any other things that you would add as to why is it important and how it can help with decision making?
Nicholas Coborn
Yes, so garbage in, garbage out if your stuff’s not up to date, like how can you make any business decision if you’re leaving things till the end of the year or a quarter? The data integrity’s no good. So if someone’s taking a look at your financials like oh cash flow says it’s 200,000 in the bank, well that was six months ago, you know, now it’s zero. So you want to make sure that for sure that you’re staying on top of it. Cash is king. Staying on top of your RAP as we said, make sure that you are not paying your bills faster than you’re getting paid. Make sure that you are staying within those, what’s the forecast?
So help navigate the cyclical nature as we talked about. But quite often in the old school accounting, especially if you give all your seats to an accountant, what they do is they do a massive journal entry in December, that’s your year end and you get what’s called like the hockey stick effect.
If you’re looking at your financials, it’s like going along, going along and all of a sudden boom, there’s all your expenses at the end of the year. Like if you’re trying to do a budget and you’re especially as you said comparative and it looks like well in May we had no expenses and in June we had no expenses. Wow. December we had $2 million. So that’s again, that kind of goes to the garbage and garbage. You’re not going to be able to get a good budget if you’re not keeping up to date. Death and tax is a little ominous. But definitely seeing this, not necessarily death per se, but if you have an owner manager or an accountant will say that you ship all your receipts to and they disappear, that actually happened in one of our examples that everything and they’re gone and they couldn’t get ahold of them.
What do you do? So if you’re us utilizing some of your cookbooks online, cloud-based, everything’s in there, something unfortunately happens, you’re able to easily have people pick it up and and continue. Similarly with, with taxes, like who wants to file a tax return with bad data? I mean if it’s in your favor I guess and revenue’s understated and expenses overstated, maybe it’s good. But who then wants to be audited with bad data? Like terrible, that’s literally my worst nightmare. So want to make sure you’re up to date.
Melissa Williams:
Awesome. Okay. And how often should business owners reconcile their accounts And it after that too, if you could let us know like what are the risks if someone decides not to follow your advice on reconciling their accounts?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, going to, so I think one, I guess maybe I skipped over, but definitely QuickBooks has tools to keep you up to date, make use of ’em, things can come automated. Payroll for instance is populated just by hitting approve. So you want to make sure you use those how often monthly at a minimum but even more so you want to make sure that you’re looking daily, weekly stay on top of it. because the risk becomes onerous if you have trend, like if you wait till the end of the year, transactions are going to be forgotten going to deposits so you have no idea what they are. Duplicated errors are going to be overlooked and then you’re going to have large journal entries at the end of the year to try to correct everything.
So you want to make sure you avoid that.
Melissa Williams:
Okay. Awesome. So we’re kind of near the end here so let’s just chat if you have a few quick examples you can share of how realtime data in QuickBooks can prevent small problems from becoming bigger financial problems down the road.
Nicholas Coborn
Yep. So the examples I have were debits shouldn’t equal credit. So that sounds odd that we had one example again where we were looking at these deposits and there’s no no in no open invoices. So we took a look at what was going on and, and the account was set up within revenue that essentially any deposit that came in was applied against revenue and it applied against the invoice. So it was just disappearing. So revenue was in those cases for that client went down to zero. So we found that when we were, you know, staying on top of it, we moved that deposit account to the balance sheet so we could be tracking ultimately where there may be is a deposit or undeposited funds and then we could apply the actual deposit in the bank to that account.
By doing so, we removed essentially the deposit to the balance sheet where it should be and revenue was corrected.
Another example was where similarly someone integrated a business credit card function with within QuickBooks and it actually not QuickBooks another other service provider and it, the suspense account was in the e and l as well. So you’d book an expense and then you had the credit card basically suspense account just offsetting it. So your expenses were all understated as a result.
Payroll, payroll, payroll, when I was in industry they basically said I don’t care about taxes, just make sure that the payroll is paid.
So if you have a payroll provider or accountant or someone running it and they’re going in to QuickBooks and thinking that things are up to date or cash is in the bank easy way for a payroll to bounce or have NSF problems. So you want to make sure that doesn’t happen. Also catching duplicate, we had an example where Amazon was coming directly into QuickBooks but then the person was also going in and booking manual receipts. So this is a test case exactly for Synder where they could correct that for sure. So you want to make sure that you’re staying on top. because again this was a case where the client came to us at year end saying our revenue is way too high, dunno what happened and that we easily saw that there was duplication there.
Melissa Williams:
Great, thank you for sharing those. And last question really quick here, since we are coming up to the final quarter and everyone’s probably starting to think about tax season season, what role does data accuracy play in preparing for tax season and ensuring compliance with financial regulations?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s huge. I mean again, I said it kind of tongue in cheek, I mean overstating expenses, understanding revenue might, might be a good result for a tax return but you don’t want to be in that situation. You want to make sure that your, your financials are in good order, that revenue is not overstated. You want to make sure that your transactions reported in appropriate fiscal period. So especially if things are left to the year end or someone thinks, you know, I’m going to just book everything the first day of the new fiscal year, that’s not actually correct. So if you’re audited that’s going to be trouble.
So you want to make sure that you are making sure that you know the invoices especially on those cutoffs start of the year, end of the year that you’re making sure that you’re in the correct fiscal period not only for income tax but sales tax as well.
Yeah, it’s just, I would say for sure as an accountant where you go into and everything is like period end closing procedures are done well it it and QuickBooks has tools where it actually produces the tax file for you and all the tax closing procedures that not only makes it accurate but it’s going to reduce the cost of preparation.
When the financial statements you get something that is well done and well taken care of, that is glory for an attack preparer. If it’s total mess it’d be way more expensive. And I previously mentioned this, but definitely reach out to your accountant if you don’t have an admin user. If you have an accountant they have access to the performance center and it is a phenomenal tool which will literally every report that we talked about and and ratios that we talked about today are in this performance center and it auto-populates as long as your books are up to date. So definitely as a bonus reach out, give your accountant a call, say hey, I know that exists.
So yeah, definitely want to make use of those because it’s instead of digging down and trying to get the data yourself, especially if you’re not financially that literate, it’s out there and it’s a great easy to use tool, graphs and everything. So would recommend that for sure.
Melissa Williams:
Awesome. Well thank you so much. This has been really informative. I really appreciate you being here today on behalf of Synder. Thank you. And this everybody who has joined us today. Thanks for staying on a couple extra minutes. Here is how to contact Nicholas Coborn, do you have any last thoughts you’d like to share with the group? Anything you want to tell people about getting in touch with you?
Nicholas Coborn
Yeah, definitely reach out for sure if you have like we definitely don’t do billable hour model, so if you ever have questions and you want to reach out, you just want to bounce off some of what we talked about today or do a quick kind of assessment or discussion of your company, feel free to reach out anytime. We’d be happy to have those discussions.
We only start charging when we’re actually engaged on a, on a contract together. So definitely willing love to, to meet you and discuss whether this, this presentation was helpful or how we could tailor it to your needs. So reach out at any time. We are totally virtual. We have clients actually around the globe, so happy to, I think I saw the South Africa there actually do have some, not South African clients but clients that are actually based in Canada that just came from South Africa. So happy to reach out to you as well. So yeah, feel free to reach out anytime.
Melissa Williams:
Amazing. Well thank you so much. We really appreciate you being here today and thank you to our audience. As always. Please be on the lookout for our future webinars. We’ve got some cool stuff coming up for all of you. And until then, we will see you next time. Bye
Nicholas Coborn
Bye. Thank you so much.
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