Accounting On Purpose

What does it mean when you are a Treasurer of an Association moving to a Company Limited by Guarantee and then becoming a Director on the Board, and what affect does the role change bring? Before we start thinking about the size and sophistication of your organisation, it’s important to see things from an operational perspective when defining roles and responsibilities. Some Treasurers of Associations, who look to understand the implications for their role when moving to a Company Limite...

The topic of Right of Use Assets has come up in several NFP Board and Finance Committee discussions. It causes a bit of confusion, especially when organisations, for example, are used to recognising their rent or lease payments as an expense. In this video I’m not going into the accounting rules, this will be more conceptual, so you can have an appreciation of what Right of Use Assets means when you see it and the meaning it's attempting to convey. It is one of the harder acco...

As the CEO of an NFP, telling your story in meaningful and consistent ways is vital to delivering on your purpose. In this podcast, I discuss storytelling through the language of accounting, and why the CEO, Board and stakeholders should speak it regularly to tell their story. Creating a meaningful story with the numbers on the page may be challenging at first, however when spoken regularly, this unique approach has many benefits. Using the language of accounting in storytelling cr...

Today I want to talk to you about recruitment bias and how it plays into the daily running of your business. The cost of recruitment bias needs to be examined in order to make good decisions as you move the business forward.In this episode we look into unconscious bias in recruitment that you may have and general unconscious bias in the workplace and how once we recognise where it shows up, we can begin to manage it. One way that unconscious bias in recruitment and selection plays out is the ...

Are you part of the finance team in your organisation or do you have a finance team? Today I want to talk to you about understanding finance team culture and its organisational impact so that you can make strides towards enhancing your team culture.While the finance culture is just one area of organisational culture, it is an important one. In today’s episode I delve into how culture not only impacts your business but how it creates value within the business. Naturally, this affects not...

Firing a client is never easy and it’s not something any of us ever really want to do. However, it’s important to maintain a profitable business so that sometimes means doing the difficult thing. In this episode I want to take you through my process of understanding when you should be firing a client - tips to determine client profitability.To understand when to fire a client, a great place to start is with a client profitability analysis. That being said, determining whether or not they are ...

In this episode I want to talk about paying yourself first from your business and also why, how and when to do it. So, the question is, are you paying yourself first? And if so, do you know how to pay yourself first?If your business is bringing in income and you are doing all the work then it stands to reasons that you need to pay yourself first. It’s a big step for a lot of people to pay themselves before they pay others but you need to know how to pay yourself as a business owner because it...

Personal/professional development training is one of those expenses where it can be difficult to measure in terms of impact and ROI as it’s a long term venture. Personal development training expenses can also eat up a large portion of your PD budget if you aren’t careful.In this episode we look at personal development and professional development and how these business expenses should be considered within your training and development budget. Training and coaching employees is essential to lo...

Finding an accountant can be a daunting task at the best of times. On the one hand there is an abundance of accountants all seemingly performing the same duties. On the other hand, how do you know who to trust? Do they specialise in your type of business? How do you go about asking the right questions when you’re hiring an accountant?I’m going to answer these questions and more in today’s episode. Hiring an accountant for small business doesn’t have to be scary and you don’t need to fear it. ...

If COVID has taught us one thing, it’s that having a business continuity plan is necessary moving forward. In this episode I want you to think about your own business continuity planning for your business and how that has effectively become a business continuity planning process that can now be documented and written into your business systems.Second to this, I want you to think about the change management principles this pandemic has activated and how that too should be something docume...