For most people, unless you live in the accounting world, talking about the General Ledger might not be the most scintillating of topics, but it’s a pretty important part of your business. The GL is where everything financial in your business comes together. And we all know how important sound finances are for building a growing, sustainable company.
The GL provides a detail glimpse into your company financials. A messy GL could be a sign of bigger issues: things like poorly managing transactions and budgets, a lack of transparency, and understanding into your business’ performance. A messy GL takes time to reconcile and prevents you from knowing sooner of any potential issues your company faces which might let you take corrective action before a crisis. Keeping your GL clean makes it easier for auditors to review your financials and give you a clean bill of health.
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When you have piles of cash, cash management becomes a fun exercise. Apple, for example, is likely enjoying the fact they have nearly $100 Billion in cash reserves they get to figure out how to use.
But for most, cash management is a matter of making sure there’s more coming in then going out – and controlling exactly how it goes out the door. Your cash flow makes or breaks your business.
Certainly the first rule of construction cash management is controlling spending. It’s easy to let expenses grow when you’re focused on satisfying your demanding clients. If you don’t have a solid method of tracking expenses on each project, you’re at risk. Sometimes you have to ‘invest’ in a project and your business to achieve that next level. Managing cash flow is key to keeping the ship upright.
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Payroll is one of those necessary evils of business. And in construction, it can get particularly messy with the diversity and scope of workers needed each with their own union, pay scales and restrictions. Pile on state and local requirements, double time, over time and top it off with the transient nature of construction work and your payroll can become a serious beast to reckon with.
Common payroll errors happen when your people don’t have the proper training, or your processes are inefficient or you lack the technology to integrate your payroll easily into your job costing and project management. And no, an Excel spreadsheet is not considered technology.
Such errors include missing or illegible info on intake forms, incorrect job classification and pay rates due to employees moving from job to job and poor data entry. The pressure to get a new construction job underway while bringing on many new workers over the course of a few days causes many to cut corners on data entry and training. Your people and processes are under pressure to deliver fast.
If you’re people are moving from project to project and performing a variety of tasks each with their own pay rate, there’s more opportunity for error.
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By Susan Little, Product Marketing Manager
In today’s society where social media rules, it seems that people can’t stop talking about themselves. Often times technology which is meant to enable conversations like Twitter, LinkedIn or other electronic media actually come across focused on the “what’s in it for me” business – where talking about your company can give the impression that you care more about your product than your customer needs.
. That is why when I was invited to the Customer Product Focus Group sessions last week I jumped at the opportunity. Where else could you participate in a gathering of customers around a table to hear “in their own words” what they need from us?
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