Road Trip! Guidance You Can Count On

Road Trip!

Guidance You Can Count On

Keeping up on where you’re going is vital to any business, small or large. Watching trends, tracking expenses and monitoring cash flow are all basics of good business. You wouldn’t keep driving straight if the road veers to the left, would you? You might, if you don’t notice the curve. That’s the type of problem any business can run into, if you just don’t watch where you’re going.

Metrics are the lifeblood of any industry; from Information technology to accounting, manufacturing, and retail. Acting like a guidance system, or GPS, your company’s metrics will tell you where and when you need to make a change to keep up with your industry and the needs of your clients. Look at your business the way you look at a road trip across the country. Would you leave home without a map or directions to your destination? Probably not. You could, but getting where you want to be would become an almost insurmountable task. Without directions you end up taking wrong turns, getting lost, and just have a difficult time making forward progress.

The possibility of breaking down in the middle of nowhere grows as well. Like on a road trip, it’s probable that anything that goes wrong will do so at the worst time imaginable. Unlike your car, however, your business doesn’t have AAA. No one to call to bring you gas or give you a tow, so knowing you have what you need to get where you’re going is the best bet. The only way to do that is with metrics; gathered, compiled, and triple checked. Your business needs maintenance just like your car does. Oil changes, alignments, tune-ups, new tires when the weather changes or the old ones have worn out. It’s all part of being prepared; which is a good thing to be, in business or on a road trip.

Watching how your business is performing in the market should be a simple thing, but it’s not. Not usually anyway. It requires poring over spreadsheets, running the numbers a dozen times, and re-evaluating the information you gather again and again. It takes hours of your time. It takes hours of your clients’ time. Just pulling up all of the information you need is time-consuming, and often daunting, but compiling it into a usable form is a hefty task in and of itself.

In any business, using your time efficiently is a priority and usually easier said than done. More often than not the process of seeing where you’re heading takes hours. Literally, hours. Of course your financial software has reports and statistical data monitors built into it, but the information is usually presented in a way that is less than helpful when it comes to seeing trends or where you’re heading in any given aspect. One would think that in today’s society, where easier is always better, someone somewhere would come up with a solution to this problem.

Well, someone did. The Corelytics Financial Dashboard, from Corelytics.com, integrates directly with your accounting software of choice and pulls all of the data you need into one place. What used to take hours only takes minutes. The dashboard even gives you the ability to compare your business with industry standards and set customizable goals. You’ve got the green light, so check your dashboard, get direction, and get your business moving forward.

Make Sense?