Let’s face it: You didn’t start an e-commerce brand just so you could worry about accounting.
Your passion lies in building your brand, optimizing product lines, and leading your team toward a shared vision of success.
While you appreciate that your company’s finances are important, they often get pushed to the back burner.
You might tell yourself that once revenue hits a sweet spot, you’ll give your numbers the attention they deserve.
But like most things in life, the things we find it easy to procrastinate on benefit from routines.
Just as it’s easy to skip working out due to work focus, having a routine ensures that something important gets done automatically.
So, how can you establish such a routine for your company’s finances?
The key? Implement a routine so foolproof, it practically runs on autopilot.
In this video, I’m going to give you the simplest routine possible to make sure that you’re working towards a financially disciplined company.
If you prefer reading, let’s start with the daily routine.
Daily Routine
There are two key activities you want to include in your daily routine: reviewing sales and monitoring your cash balance.
1. Review sales
Hopefully, many of you are already doing this, but if not, it’s crucial to start.
Everything in your business—your profit, your cash flow, your inventory—flows from sales.
So you should be, on a daily basis, checking your Shopify dashboard, Amazon, looking at wholesale orders to have an idea of where your sales are going.
Checking it daily has the benefit of being able to respond to issues very quickly when you notice something going wrong, but it also has this underrated benefit of you having a finger on the pulse of your sales activities.
Over time, you develop a sense for how things are going, where there might be issues, and what to expect.
2. Cash balance
The second task is to keep a daily pulse on your cash balance.
Checking your cash balance daily and understanding why it fluctuates helps you develop an intuitive sense of your company’s cash flows.
It’ll also make you a lot more responsive to big cash swings.
If you check your cash only once a month, you’re looking at a mix of numerous deposits and withdrawals.
This could appear as a flatline, but it won’t give you the same insights as seeing the daily ins and outs.
While you can get similar information with a monthly check, doing it daily provides a better intuitive sense of your company’s financial health.
Weekly Routine
Next up, there are three things that you want to do on a weekly basis.
1. Review accounts receivable
If you only sell on Shopify, accounts receivable might be less relevant. But if you have wholesale customers, it matters.
Check this weekly to track how overdue certain invoices are and get in the habit of following up with customers who are slow to pay.
It’s very common for companies to check their accounts receivable once every month or two months, and an invoice could be 60 days overdue, and they haven’t followed up a single time.
Checking weekly means you follow up more regularly, which means that people will pay you more frequently, which means more cash in the door and better behavior from customers.
2. Review Accounts Payable
On the flip side, you want to check your accounts payable weekly as well.
One major benefit of this is that it gives you a very good sense of what sort of cash outflows to expect in the next 30 to 60 days based on the bills that you have to pay.
The other benefit is that it makes it easier to pay all of the bills that you want to pay in a given week in one shot.
This is more efficient than going in and making one-off payments every time a vendor emails you that you haven’t paid.
3. Categorize transactions
The third thing that you want to do on a weekly basis is categorize all of your e-commerce transactions from your bank feed in your accounting software.
This means every transaction from your bank accounts, especially those on your credit card.
The reason I like weekly is that it’s a good balance between efficiency and also still having a pulse of what’s going on.
While checking your bank balance daily is a quick task, categorizing transactions can take some time. Doing this task weekly is more efficient.
It’s also a good way to do a mini-review of how your week went from a spending perspective.
I also prefer to do it weekly versus monthly because if you do it once a month, then oftentimes it can be kind of difficult to remember what that transaction was from 30 days ago, so weekly strikes a nice balance.
Monthly Routine
And lastly, we’ve got the things that you should be doing on a monthly basis.
1. Review financial statements and KPIs
The first one is reviewing your financial statements and your KPIs.
Certain transactions are typically recorded monthly, and your accounting team will handle various month-end closing processes.
So, you’ll usually get your finalized financial statements—income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement—once a month.
Take the time to review these documents in detail to understand how your business is performing.
While most brand owners focus on the income statement, the balance sheet is equally important. Tiny issues can hide in the balance sheet that won’t appear on your income statement.
Use this opportunity to review other KPIs as well.
These could be financial KPIs like
- days inventory on hand or
- new customer revenue vs. returning customer revenue
If you need some ideas, check out our video on e-commerce KPIs for more insights.
2. Forecasting
The next step you should take every month might seem advanced, but it’s absolutely critical for your financial mastery.
Most brands neglect a proper forecasting process, but this is where you can outshine the competition.
If you do have one, compare your forecasted figures against the actual figures each month. This isn’t just a routine—it’s your secret weapon for financial clarity.
Use this information to update your forecasts for future months.
Brands that ignore their forecasts are like drivers speeding down a highway with a broken fuel gauge. Don’t be among them.
When you align your forecasts with actual results, you gain invaluable insights. You’ll understand why you’ve deviated and exactly what needs tweaking—whether it’s your strategy or your expectations.
Now, forecasting might feel complex, but that’s no reason to shy away from it. Seek the expertise of specialized accounting firms like ours; we’ve helped many brands achieve this.
By dedicating just a bit of time to this crucial accounting practice, you’ll maintain a sharp pulse on your business’s financial health.
And that, my friend, places you miles ahead of competitors who are groping in the dark.