Financials

Accounting is a cornerstone of a successful business. Without thorough financial records, any business, no matter how successful, will quickly become entangled in a sticky mess of confusion and utter chaos. Keeping accurate and up-to-date financial records are important in keeping track of just how successful your business is at any point in time. Valid finances quantitatively reveal which business advances are successful and which prove to be nothing more than the most inexpedient fiascos. This lets your team devote more time to the areas that are proving most profitable and less time to dead-weight projects that are dragging your team down. In our SofTee business, we realised that on-campus sales were not very profitable, so we devoted more energy to selling off-campus by improving our website—making it more helpful and user-friendly.

In a FBE team, it gets really easy to get caught up in the adrenaline rush of selling your product. This can cause you to forget to keep your financial statements up to date. When you do finally get around to it, it will be very hard to go back and track every single transaction that you had made, unless you keep very meticulous notes. For this reason, I highly suggest that you record every single transaction the day that it is made. This is important for your own wallet too; if your team borrows money from you, it is in your best interest that you keep thorough records to show that you must be reimbursed.

In addition to that, with a team of nine members, plus or minus a few, money will be going through various hands and will conclude, hopefully, in your bank account. For this reason, I stress that it is very important to keep track of all transactions very carefully. Even if you do set up a system where people are to record what the transaction are themselves, it is necessary to make sure that every member of the team is keeping up with this, or else orders or money will be lost and that will lead to catastrophe.

Your financial statement will be an easy way of seeing how well you are doing as a team, so it is the perfect tool to see how up-to-date you are on your project. Feedback is essential to a successful business. Like market research, financial records are another great mechanism of feedback that can make or break your enterprise.