When you’re sailing you always have an eye on the weather – hence the expression ‘keep a weather eye’.
Life is full of storms and squalls, both literal and metaphorical, which we have to navigate, and the better prepared we are then the more likely we are to come out the other side, a little battered maybe, but alive. If you’re at sea and aren’t prepared for the storms the consequences can be severe, if not fatal.
On board we have safety equipment including life jackets and buoyancy aids, life rafts, flares, safety lines. They don’t stop the storms – but they mean we are better prepared to face them.
2020 has been challenging, with more than its fair share of storms. I think that’s a pretty fair statement!
So much of what has been happening has been unprecedented, and that is where the challenge has lain, with no experiences on which to base decisions and take action to combat the situation. There were warnings and lessons to be learnt as the global pandemic spread, but none of us have experienced anything like it.
However we have all now experienced the upheaval of a pandemic, and can actually take the opportunity to learn from that. Whether or not we have another spike and another lockdown, there may well be other storms which could have an equally disastrous impact on your business, and now is the time to have a strategy in place to deal with them if and when they hit.
From an accounting systems point of view take the opportunity to review what you do and how you do it. Look at the areas that you struggled with during lockdown and subsequently as you start to trade out of it. What worked and what didn’t.
Did you struggle to get meaningful information from your system, were you dependent on someone having to go into the office. With staff being unable to work did you find yourself struggling to work with the individual idiosyncratic systems they had developed to manage their role and which no-one else understood (or even knew about) – spreadsheets for inventory, lead management, customer management, staff management, the list goes on.
All of those problems can be solved by cloud-based system. With Xero integrating with in excess of 800 apps, so many business problems that have up till now been solved with a carefully constructed (for that, read complex and error-prone) spreadsheet can now be replaced with a specific app, which will work with your accounting system rather than sitting apart from it.
We can’t be sure what lies ahead – but we can prepare based on the knowledge we now have. Bridge Financials can help you prepare your financials systems so that you can have the gear you need to weather the storms.
