August Is Actually a Good Time to Fix Your Books

By Frank Gramlich, CPA | Xavier Financial Services

Early in my own business, I was the client I now help fix. Work came in waves. Busy season kept the lights on, and my books received attention when everything else slowed down. During busy season, the answer was always the same: "Who has the time?" My books and records weren't necessarily wrong, but they were behind, unreconciled, approximate.

So, I know what that feels like from the inside.

A few months ago, we put on our marketing hats and sat down to do something we'd been talking about for months. We carved out dedicated time to execute on our content strategy (themes, topics, social posts, newsletter) through the end of the year and implemented a plan to draft new content a week or two ahead of its posting schedule.

July was our first month of clean execution. Everything went out, nothing was late, and our newsletter, Xavier Perspective, was published for the first time. The stress around the whole process was the first thing to disappear. When we meet weekly now, we're not scrambling to pull something relevant and coherent together.

During one of those meetings, Rose observed something I've been thinking about since: "The same organization and discipline we need to keep our posting consistent is what our clients need to keep bookkeeping and accounting on track."

Last week, I finished catching a client up on her books. She runs a family business, and things had fallen behind. This was not a result of negligence, but the same combination of busy and "I'll get to it" that catches most small business owners. When we finished, her sense of relief was immediately noticeable.

Nothing particularly dramatic had changed, but now the numbers make sense. If a duplicate payment occurs, we'll catch it as it occurs instead of at tax time. She can think strategically about what comes next for her business. This eliminates guess work regarding where to invest, what to cut, or what the year's performance actually looks like.

That is a glimpse at the peace of mind that having current books actually provides.

Whether you work with us, a bookkeeper, or a fractional CFO, maintaining sloppy books is doing your business a disservice. That's the reality of running your business with incomplete information.

The costs are real even when they're invisible. Estimated tax payments get guessed at instead of calculated - if they're paid at all. Decisions about hiring, equipment, or distributions get made on instinct instead of data. The year-end closing process becomes a scramble that didn't have to be one.

August has something going for it that February doesn't: there's still time to fix it. Four months of clean up and good habit heading into year-end is worth considerably more than twelve months of catch-up in January.

If your books are behind, this is a reasonable time to change that.