The Top 3 Essential Financial Services

Accounting and Auditing Services

These services are particularly vital to a business because auditors and accountants typically help a business to assess the processes it uses to collect, record, organize, and report financial information. This assessment is a major prerequisite to the success of the business because it gives it a clear picture of how it operates and therefore enables its decision maker(s) to make the right decisions in terms of its financial systems. Furthermore, in the current business environment, the demand for businesses to conduct their financial operations in a transparent manner necessitates regular audits in order to comply with this demand. In order to reap the benefits of auditing and accounting services, you should hire accountants and auditors who understand the unique financial issues in your industry and are capable of complying with the set accounting and auditing standards.

Inventory Review Services

By carrying out regular inventory valuations, you may be able to predict the state of your business growth prospects more accurately and probably find better methods of improving the efficiency of your businesses operations/systems. An effective inventory review will also enable you to keep track of your business’s banks accounts and taxes. Furthermore, if you want to safeguard your business against risks such as embezzlement, you must conduct regular inventory reviews irrespective of the industry in which you operate.

Recordkeeping Services

As a business owner, you need to ensure that you hire a qualified professional to keep your financial records or books up to date and organized. If you are a small business owner, you may be able to take on the task of keeping your records updated quite easily without hiring a financial services provider. However, ensure that you comply with the acceptable recordkeeping standards in your industry in order to inspire the confidence of potential investors and/or lenders who may need to review your financial records before contributing towards ventures such as business expansion.

Conclusion

Overall, the key to identifying the most important financial services for your business is defining your most vital financial needs and looking for solutions that can fulfill these needs. However, irrespective of the financial services you determine are a priority for you, you will still need accounting/auditing, inventory review and record keeping services to achieve growth and success.

The post The 3 Financial Services That Every Business Owner Needs appeared first on Dzhingarov

One of the decision tools invented by Stuart Pugh was the Weighted Decision Matrix.  Here is an example of what a weighted decision matrix looks like.

As you can see, the decision matrix is a tool that helps you make a choice between several options based on the importance of the factors involved in the decision making process.  It is important to understand that this system doesn’t magically produce an answer to your question where no options previously existed.  You must be in a position where you are trying to decide between different solutions to your problem.  In the example above, the decision matrix is helping a small business to decide which accountant to employ but you can use the tool in many different situations such as when choosing where to go on holiday or deciding which car to purchase to name just a couple.

Too often poor decisions are made because every angle isn’t considered and emotion takes over.  This method encourages people to draw breath, step back and think through every factor involved which by design makes the decision much more objective.

The decision matrix is weighted so as to give more value to the most important factors.  This allows the model to better reflect real life where practical factors such as cost are far more important than emotional needs such as the desire for a luxury holiday.  Cost has to outweigh the level of luxury and the model allows this to happen by removing the emotion from the decision.

To use the decision matrix, you need to list the options you have and the factors to consider as in the example above.  Each factor then needs to be weighted by giving it a score out of five where the higher the number the more important the factor.  A result is reached simply by filling out the matrix by scoring each option against each factor.  The scores are then multiplied by the weighted value and each column added up to give a total score.  The winner is then easily identified.

The matrix can be used as a tool by yourself or as a group.  It can be filled in after discussion with other people involved in the decision making process or you could ask everyone to fill it in independently before comparing and contrasting the results.  Try both methods to see which you prefer but be prepared for a heated discussion about which factors are the most important and why one option deserves a four rather than a five!  In all honesty, this is a great way of teasing out objections and difficulties in a decision making group.  You may not like doing so but it will save you from lengthy discussion further down the line.

If you decide to construct a weighted decision matrix let us know if you did it alone or in a group and what experiences you had.  How did it work for you?  Let us know in the comments down below.

The post Using a Pugh decision matrix to help make objective decisions appeared first on Dzhingarov