Top line income, be it sales or salary is meaningless, it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep. Effective businesses and individuals are not interested in sales figures or gross income but in net income after tax. Looking at top line figures is just plain silly. Which would you…
There’s very little difference between the two words but in the modern world, don’t digitise, digitalise. Digitising is converting your current systems, processes and data to digital. The move toward a paperless office involves digitising. Put another way the basic data is unchanged in content, just in form. This is…
Effective management is about continuous improvement and that’s why performance drivers really matter. It is very easy to get bogged down in the numbers. Actual v Budget, trends, forecasts, feed forward, feed back etc. etc. But effectively control the drivers and you effectively control the performance. This all began with…
Managing a business is hard and finding ways to make it easier is an attractive thing to do, that’s why bad managers love percentages. On many occasions we have discussed the fact that in order to be effective as an individual or an organisation you need a goal. Good managers…
Being effective means that you must adopt the best possible techniques to achieve your goal and here we see why digitalisation changes everything. In the past the only jobs that were at risk were those that could be automated. In other words those jobs that require repetitive and easily replicable…
If you read the accountancy books, assets and liabilities are very carefully defined, but when is an asset not an asset? I particularly like the definition of an asset in Robert Kiyosaki’s book Rich Dad, Poor Dad. In this book he clearly defines an asset as as “something that puts…
Things change and what was good can become bad, overheads are one of those things, let’s see why overheads are bad. Many years ago I was working with some small retailers who wanted to be based in Stratford-Upon-Avon. In those days Stratford was a major tourist and retail centre and…
Inventory (or stock as we used to call it) is a controversial subject so let’s see why inventory valuations are wrong. This is not going to be a technical discussion around accounting standards. For statutory purposes you must stick to the rules even though they can cause you to make…
Most businesses and many individuals set budgets, but how to set an effective budget? Setting an effective budget does not begin with any numbers. It begins with the objective. If you don’t know the objective of your business or for that matter yourself then setting an effective budget is impossible.…
You know the feeling. You get this great idea or just a thought or spot this great piece of information and then a couple of hours later you can’t remember what it was or where to find it. So, how to remember things. It is important to be able to…