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The beginning of the year is a good time to reassess your company's finances and to make some New Year's resolutions related to your company's financial operations. Due to budget and resource constraints, most small businesses have areas for improvement. Given the difficult economic conditions we face, it is more important than ever to reassess your company's finances. We suggest you review the following areas:

Organization
The first step to understanding and improving your finances in to get organized:

• Identify outstanding vendor and clients contracts including renewal dates and auto-renewal provisions.
• Specify internal controls processes including how customer contracts are priced and company expenses approved.
• Understand high risk receivables and bad debt risks.
• Have a monthly budget and compare actual results to budget every month.
• Have accurate financial statements and meaningful operational reports that give insight into your company's performance.

Timeliness
You should know how your business is performing as you go, not long after the fact. Financial and operational reports are worth little unless they are available when business managers need the information to make good business decisions. A timely close used to mean 15 to 30 days after the end of a month. These days a company's books can usually be closed within a week using best practices and technology tools. Yet many businesses still take weeks to produce month-end reports, and some business owners feel like monthly reports are of so little value there is no formal reporting process. Even accurate reports are no longer very relevant if delivered weeks or months after the end of a month.

Cost Structure
In tough economic times like these, it is incumbent upon business leaders to match their cost structure to their current (likely lower) revenue levels. Cutting costs can be painful, and difficult decisions must be made. During good times production capacity and general overhead can be inflated, and during lean times they must be scaled back. A bottom up approach can sometimes be helpful where you start with a zero budget and prioritize where to spend money, rather than simply starting with last year's spending levels as often is done.

Efficiency
A focus on improving efficiency is critical to maintaining your company's ability to perform with reduced resources. Technology can be a great enabler. Now is also a great time to redesign internal processes to ensure time spent by employees is used most productively. Seek to leverage technology and best practices to produce more while spending less time and money.

SmartBooks can help in each of these areas:

Organization
Our bookkeeping system uses technology to automate and control the bookkeeping process. You take charge of the bill approval process. Your financial statements will be consistently accurate. We will design custom reports to give you insight into your business. You will know what's going on with your business.

Timeliness
Financial reports are delivered promptly within a few days after the end of each month. Electronic integration with your bank and credit card accounts gives you means you get good real-time data during the month. You will get the information you need, when you need it, in order to better manage your business.

Cost Structure
SmartBooks is less expensive than employing part-time or full-time bookkeeping staff. Furthermore, SmartBooks lets you avoid the step function cost associated with hiring employees. Our service can grow or shrink with your business's needs. Also, our contract is month-to-month.

Efficiency
SmartBooks allows you to spend less time on bookkeeping and processing paperwork. We allow you to spend more time on sales and client service so you can make the most of your opportunities to maintain and grow your revenue. For example, did you know that instead of dealing with paper bills and cutting and signing checks, you can get a weekly email with links to view, approve, and pay bills with just a few clicks of your mouse? For example, instead of having your office manager organize and fill up paper filing cabinets, use our online document management system. Accounting technology has progressed. Take advantage of it.