In today’s world, knowing your numbers is crucial to your small business’s success.
Managing money is an art, and if you do it correctly, it can mean the difference between success and failure.
The old saying: “what you focus on expands” is a powerful statement. When you put your attention on a specific topic or matter within your business it will move with whatever direction you aim to go.
If you focus on managing your money, it will be more organized and controlled, plus it will grow – one of the main reasons why you’re in business to begin with. Having fun and creating fulfillment is important in business, but at the end of the day, you’ve got your own family’s mouths to feed as well as your employees and their families’ mouths as well.
Knowing your business’s cash flow and target revenue/profit goals will help you sleep better at night. There are obviously unpredictable events that can happen, and if you’re more organized with your finances, you become a better leader and business owner.
As business owners, we should always focus on being strong stewards of money.
It is a skill that we should improve on every day. Think ROI with every dollar deployed.
There are a few great apps/tools out there that can help you manage your business’s finances.
TrueBill – an app that allows you to track both your personal and business finances by letting you:
Manage subscriptions
Create a budget
View all your accounts, credit cards, etc.
Track spending
Negotiate subscriptions
I downloaded TrueBill in September of 2019 because my good friend, Anthony, told me about it. Every day, I look at my accounts to make sure everything is flowing correctly and that I’m diligent about my money.
A cool feature – you can set it up so you get notifications when money gets deposited into any of your accounts. I love waking up every day and seeing a notification on the front screen of my iPhone:
“Congratulations! You just received money!”
Rate Tracker – a software that helps small business owners automatically keep track of their credit card processing fees every month.
You can go to https://app.ratetracker.io/ref/hardcorecloser and sign up for free if you’re a business owner that accepts credit cards. Every month, you’ll get a text message and an email that tells you:
Last month’s credit card processing fees
Last month’s credit card processing sales
Last month’s out-the-door rate
With Rate Tracker, you will know your numbers and, if your processor raises your rate or your merchant costs go up, you’ll find out immediately instead of months or years down the line. This will save you thousands of your hard-earned dollars.
Let’s be real – as business owners, we don’t keep track of this major expense in our business, and most of us have no clue what the hell we’re paying ion credit card fees and why.
Rate Tracker makes it simple for you to track your fees and acts as your business bank account’s “watch-dog” so you can focus on growing your business and not worry about your payment processor raising your rates.
Here are some other great apps that help small businesses track their business expenses:
BizXpense Tracker: rated one of the best expense tracking apps. You can integrate it with Google Maps to track mileage in real time and also keep receipts and billable hours by client, date, or geographic location. It only costs $6.99 and you can add additional features in it such as device-to-device syncing.
Shoeboxed: a way for you to organize your receipts. You can integrate it with Gmail to track digital receipts and you can upload images of receipts as well. It’s a bit pricey at $39 per month. A big value add with Shoeboxed is that you can get a PDF of all receipts and reports from the year so that when tax filing time comes around, you can send all of your information to the IRS from one simple place.
Concur: for small business owners that travel frequently, Concur is a tool for you to keep track of Airfare, hotels, rental cars, etc. and if you travel internationally, it will even calculate currency exchange rates. Of the apps listed in this article, Concur is the most expensive, and also the most valuable for traveling merchants. It’s priced on a per-transaction basis, with a minimum spend of $83 per month.
The apps above allow you to stay organized and save yourself time & money – an absolute must-have for us business owners. The most important asset we have as business owners is our time, and if we can save it by automating things like keeping track of our money (or at least making it simple to do so,) it helps us focus on what we want to create most: profit.
