Beginner’s Guide to the Accounting Cycle | business.com

The accounting cycle provides a detailed overview of your company’s financial standing, simplifies financial reporting and helps protect your assets.

Winning business owners know financial management is one of the most critical factors in a company’s success. An accounting cycle is one of the best ways to keep track of your business’s finances. It creates simple, organized financial data that external parties – such as investors – can easily interpret.

The accounting cycle tracks each transaction from the moment of purchase until the date it’s added to a financial statement. This eight-step process, usually completed through accounting software, is a great way to get more time in your day to focus on growing your business while protecting your assets from theft. By maintaining the accounting cycle consistently, you will notice balance discrepancies at a glance.

Here’s a look at the accounting cycle and its eight-step process.

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Do You Know the 3 Rs of Financial Reporting? | All Business

I’m going to let you in on a secret: The best businesses—those that really boost the wealth and happiness of the business owner—are not built on intuition or luck.

As much as we would like to think that great entrepreneurs have some kind of special gift, the best among us simply know how to create and use meaningful financial reporting, and use it to make decisions that improve our businesses. With a good eye on the numbers and some careful analysis, any business owner can see what is going right and what is going wrong.

But running a business “by the numbers” means that your financial reports needs be built on the 3 R’s: Reliability, Readability, and Regularity:

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