You need to have target dates for your accounts.

• When will you have all your sales invoices printed and sent out to your customers.
• When will you have all your purchase invoices passed and entered into your accounts system.
• When will you have a Profit and Loss statement and Balance Sheet completed.

When one of the deadlines is missed, say, not all the bank payments are entered in the accounts system, then you are not able to prepare a Profit & Loss Statement, perform a Bank reconciliation, know if all your suppliers are paid and if they were paid the correct amount, and how do you plan your cash flow.

The other problem for me is that if I go to my client office to prepare monthly accounts but instead spend my time getting everything up to date to allow me to complete my primary task of preparing a Profit & Loss statement and Balance Sheet, then client does not get the best out of my time and I don’t get everything done that I wanted to do.

So how do you overcome this?

I have prepared a list of tasks that the client is responsible for completing and I have a list of tasks I am responsible for. I will not visit the client until they have their tasks done and when I do visit them I must complete my tasks before we move on to anything else. In this way we both benefit. We all get what we want and need to run the business and by having the financial information ready and up to date we can make decisions confidently, as we are working with the must correct and up to date financial date.  We know our profit, we know who owes us money, we know who we owe money to and the very important cash requirements for the future. And at the end of every visit all the required tasks are done and we can get on with growing the business as we have information to work with.