MATS Consulting

Understanding Accounting & Finance, Part 2 – The Profit & Loss Report.

The Profit & Loss (P&L) is one of the key monthly management reports which tells you how you are doing financially, for a month and for the year to date.

It can help you see if you are on track to make a profit for the year, and show you areas to look at in order to help you control your costs.

As a business owner you are always keen to know if you can employ more staff or if perhaps you are employing too many staff, your profit and loss will help you to make this decision. It also allows you to pinpoint and focus in on other areas of your business that need attention, so you can deal with problems quickly and keep your business on track and growing.

Make Peace With Money Tools – Tapping (EFT)

I use a number of tools in my work of helping people Make Peace with Money, and I want to share a bit about each one so that you have an idea of why I use them, and most importantly, how they work.

The first tool to tell you about is called Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Tapping.

I discovered tapping almost five years ago, during a period of intense stress for me. The year was 2016, my husband, Paul, had a mental breakdown, and my Mom was seriously ill with cancer. We were in serious financial difficulty because Paul couldn’t work, and I was convinced that we wouldn’t survive; I used to imagine us losing everything and ending up homeless!

I began to search for natural ways to manage my stress, and that’s when I came across Nick Ortner’s website (I’ll tell you a bit more about Nick in a minute) which was all about this thing called EFT, and how by tapping on various points of the body you could reduce stress. This whole idea intrigued me and matched my way of thinking, so I bought his book, and the rest, as they say, is ‘tapping’ history.

Is Your Business Ready for the Scrutiny of the Digital Age?

One of my clients is currently going through an external audit (I can hear the collective groans from here…..) and it is the usual thankless process of answering the long, almost never ending, list of queries from the auditor.

Audits seem to take up so much time and expense, but why is that? What if the process could be made less painful for all involved?

I guess there will always be the list of queries, after all it is difficult for an external person to understand how a company works, and to get to grips with finding and understanding the information they need.

Poor accounting systems and procedures can be one of the main challenges faced by both the auditor, and the company being audited, and this in turn can cause a lot of friction between the two parties.

Understanding Accounting & Finance, Part 1 – Introduction.

Some industries make use of lots of technical terms, and accounting and finance is one of the main culprits, it’s up there with IT.

Whilst you may be able to get away with not understanding a lot of the technical jargon (especially where computers are concerned) when running a business, accounting and finance is an area where it is worth getting to grips with the basics, and then some.

It doesn’t mean you need to be an expert, after all, that’s what you pay your finance team, a bookkeeper or an accountant for; what it does mean is that you are aware of what is going on.

Can We Make Our Own Rules In Business?

There is the standard check-list of things to things to think about when running a business, including staff levels, training, sales and marketing, finance and IT to name but a few, but what if you have all of this in place and are still struggling; could there be something else stopping your business from being the success you deserve?

In my last blog we explored Limiting Beliefs; what they are and how they are created, and these could be the unseen barrier in your professional life, as well as personally.

“Yes, everything is simple. It’s people who complicate things.”
Albert Camus

The workplace can be full of set beliefs or habits, those things that happen just because that’s always the way things have been done.