ESG and Small Businesses
Pick up just about any public company’s most recent annual report, and you’ll find a section on ESG. ESG stands for Environment, Social, and Governance, and the trend of not only considering, but also measuring a company’s sustainability performance on ESG issues has...
How a Loan Affects Your Financial Statements
Getting your business loan can be an exciting step in the growth of your business. Recording your loan properly in your accounting system usually requires special handling by your accountant. Your loan statement will provide the information you need to get it booked...
How to Write a Refund Policy
A refund policy defines the processes and rules for when customers want their money back and want to return the products or services they purchased from you. It’s often required by your credit card or shopping cart company as part of maintaining PCI (Payment Card...
How to Keep Your Customers Coming Back
Measuring and encouraging customer retention is important for businesses in many industries. There are a couple of great measures to see how you are doing in this area. We’ll explain those and provide some tactical tips in this article. Measuring Customer Retention...
Why Are You in Business? Crafting Your Mission, Vision, and Values Statements
Most large businesses have developed mission, vision, and values statements to help guide them and inform stakeholders about the company’s strategic direction. Going through this strategic exercise is a wonderful idea for even the smallest business as well. A...
Online Payment Systems: They Are Not All the Same
Collecting money from customers is a key function in any business, and the more automated this process is, the better. The payment function varies by type of business, but more and more, there are online options available for collecting money over the internet. Here...
5 Ways to Rejuvenate, Refresh, and Revive Your Entrepreneurial Passion
Most entrepreneurs would agree that owning a business is an incredible privilege, and they would likely never want to go back to working for someone else. However, we all have our days! And sometimes those rough days can turn into weeks. If we’ve temporarily lost a...
Test Your Financial Resilience
There’s more to being financially resilient than simply saving enough money for a rainy day. A part of being financially responsible is maintaining good financial records – and making sure people who need access to your records know where to find them if something...
Protecting Yourself from Supply Chain Shortages
The past few years have seen major kinks in the supply chain due to a number of reasons: aberrant buyer behavior, source material scarcity, government shutdowns, and worker shortages, to name a few. What can a business owner do to protect their businesses from...
How Variance Reporting Can Keep Your Profits on Track
While there are literally hundreds of accounting reports that can help you run your business better, one of the most popular – and greatly underutilized – reports is the variance report. A variance report helps you compare how you are actually doing with either a past...