A Healthy New Report?

We’re adding new bits and pieces to KashFlow and improving what we currently have all of the time based on feedback from our customers. We list most of the noteworthy changes on our changelog page.

A year or so ago we came up with an idea of a Health Check report. You hear various rules of thumb quoted quite often. The kind of thing I mean is:

“You shouldn’t be dependent on one customer for more then 75% of your income”
“You should have enough cash in your bank account to cover 3 months of expenditure”

and so on. Now these kind of “rules of thumb” are no substitute for professional advice. Which of them have any relevance to you, you can decide yourself through the application of a bit of common sense.

The report was ready some time ago, it only covered 3 areas though. We ideally wanted it to cover more but we’ve just not had the time to devote to it. Today we decided to make the report available to everyone as it is – we’d then be able to add to and improve it based on feedback.

You can read how to access the report, and view an example here.  I posted it on to Twitter as we have a lot of KashFlow users there.

I’m amazed (and delighted) at the amount of comment it’s received.

Ben Kepes from CloudAve got in touch and asked a few questions which resulted in this write up.

[…] the report is very simplistic and of marginal direct use, far better in my view to produce a benchmarking report that leverages off the aggregate data […]
So I’m giving KashFlow a bouquet for the general direction, but a brickbat for the specific execution

Sorry Ben, you miss the point. Yes – a benchmarking report would be superb. We already do that for the creative industries in partnership with mycake. But that’s a whole different kettle of fish. It’d be “as well as” this report, not “instead of”. This report wll be improved upon – but only along the same lines it’s currently on.

This report isn’t meant to be anything incredibly insightful. It’s just a quick list of easily digestible, take-it-or-leave-it rules of thumb and how you measure up against them.

One thing Ben said on his blog did get me thinking though. I think the reason he and others have got so het up over what is essentially a very minor addition is due to the name. Perhaps a “Health Check” implies the report has some deeper significance than it should have? I guess it implies a connection with the ‘vital signs’ of your business. Something this report certainly doesn’t report on, nor does it claim to.

Anyway, an old hack once said to me that the most important thing is what ones customers have to say. So I hand you over to a chorus of contented customers, via Twitter.

UWDC:@DuaneJackson Love the new report. Clearer & more of a snapshot than ANY 12 page report accountant can do and can be done weekly I presume!

StuartWhitman: 17 page CIMA document or 2 page health check from KashFlow. You decide.
BryonyThomas: @DuaneJackson I downloaded instead and it worked… 90% can’t be a bad score in anyone’s books! Good report – thanks

useIP: @DuaneJackson Ran the Health Check, it works a treat – it tells me I need to make more repeat sales to existing customers – it is correct!!!

TurtleMediaUK: @DuaneJackson Very impressed by the new Health Check report. Way beyond anything else in the industry as far as i know

Jeewhizz: @DuaneJackson WOW – I’m v impressed with it! KashFlow has rocked my socks 😀 😉

PoLRWeb: I think the healthcheck is great – now I just need to update my accounts in KF to get a decent report!