However, fairly quickly it can become a chore rather than anything valuable such as forecasts, analysis of trends, drilling down into areas such as sales or costs.

It can also be a pain to transfer history into one place to be able to analyse information retrospectively and make comparisons between financial periods.

People can sometimes have the impression that doing their bookkeeping on spreadsheets will save them money in their accountants fees whereas in reality some accountants charge just as much as they would do for a carrier bag of records as they have to check all the formulas and links so may as well have done it themselves in the first place!

🙂

It’s amazing how many businesses just see accounts as a way of “satisfying” the tax man, rather than viewing them as a piece of business information that can be used to help them manage the business

There are all sorts of valuable pieces of information you can collate in almost any business – such as which lines are the most profitable (and should therefore be expanded) or how your costs are distributed.

We use some of the reports in KF in a fairly simple way – but even this is enough to help us increase profitability – even over the short period of time we’ve been using it!

If people go into business to make money …why then do they spend their time ignoring it and not taking the time out to understand it?