Most restaurants face a unique challenge when it comes to their accounting and their profit and loss statement. The problem is that there are different numbers of days in every month. Some months have 30 days, some have 31 days, and that pesky February has...
I recently read a CFO.com article1 in which the authors discussed the demanding processes a CFO will be required to address when a private equity partner enters the picture. There’s no question that taking on a private equity partner will result in changes and increased...
Everyone knows that there are 52 weeks in a year, right? Well, not always. In the world of accounting, there’s something called a 52-53-week fiscal year. Adopting a 52-53-week year — also sometimes referred to as a 4-4-5 calendar — could result in financial and...
Building strong vendor relationships is a key to success for most mid-sized businesses. A wide range of different vendors usually provides services and supplies merchandise and materials to most businesses — everything from the raw materials needed to manufacture goods to accounting and payroll processing...
One of the most underutilized resources at many mid-sized firms is the in-house accounting department. While devoting lots of resources to the department in terms of both money and time, many businesses don’t gain the accounting department ROI that they should.
A common reason why is...
When it comes to technology, the only thing we can be certain of is that things will change — and they will probably change rapidly. For example, just think about how different things were before the Internet exploded onto the scene about 20 years ago....
Variance analysis is one of the most useful tools available to companies today for business planning, management and review. Used to assess deviations from results of various key performance indicators (KPIs), variance analysis can reveal many aspects and outcomes of financial and operational imperatives.
It has...
An advisory board is one of the most valuable resources any middle-market business owner or CEO can have. In publicly-held companies, the role of the board of directors is more formalized, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of the board of advisors in a privately-held...
You’ve no doubt heard of the 80-20 rule. Also known as the Pareto Principle after its late-19th century founder William Pareto, the 80-20 rule can be applied to many different things including time management, productivity, investing, the distribution of labor, and sales. It states that...
The finance team and the sales team are usually thought of as two totally separate entities with little crossover between them. The finance team members are the “number crunchers” and the sales team members are the “rain makers.” They live in separate worlds, the thinking...