Perfect financial reports
What’s the secret to having perfect financial reports that immediately answer every question you’ll ever have about your business?
The secret: You can't.
In fact, if perfection is your goal, that’s a sign you may need to learn more about Finance & Accounting.
Early in my career, I worked with a CEO who hated Finance because no report was ever perfect.
Forecasts never matched Actuals
Some transactions always ended up uncategorized
No one could give us an objective answer on Profit per Product
The books were never ready by the first of the month
And all of this was evidence that the Finance team wasn’t doing their job.
But here’s the thing: They were.
They simply weren’t communicating clearly
Or the CEO wasn’t listening.
Because every single “mistake” listed above isn’t actually a mistake; It’s how Finance & Accounting are supposed to work:
Forecasts never matched Actuals
Because forecasts are educated guesses based on the best info you have but will seldomly perfectly predict the future.
Some transactions always ended up uncategorized
Because even the best accounting software can’t always anticipate the categorization of new transactions. It’s actually less annoying for systems to NOT categorize transactions rather than guess incorrectly and hide mistakes in your chart of accounts.
No one could give us an objective answer on Profit per Product
Profit attribution depends on subjective decisions around where costs of shared stuff (like your rent or your R&D department) should be allocated. There is no objective answer.
The books were never ready by the first of the month
Most companies take at least a week to close their books. You can produce forecasts and estimates long before that. But your accounting software is a high-assurance system of record that requires time to collect historical data, cross-check, and maintain.
Is your finance department driving you crazy with bad reports?
Because sure - Finance is annoying and there’s lots we can do to make it better.
But maybe it’s also time to double-check,
That the problem isn’t you.
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