When you should check your financials daily

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In our last video, we talked about the financial review rhythm. How often do you look at your financials without making yourself crazy?

Today I want to talk about those exceptional businesses, those high transaction volume businesses that might be doing something, some sort of review on a daily basis. These are businesses like restaurants and retail and there are probably some others, but many of these business owners I know check their sales on a daily basis.

So the key to checking your sales though is that you need to compare it to a similar day and a similar time of year, Tuesday isn’t the same as Friday and January aren’t the same as December, so make sure you’re comparing your sales to, you know, if you’re looking at sales from a Friday in August you’re looking at sales from the previous Friday in August or the previous year.

The second thing that their hopefully paying really good attention to is what’s selling and what’s not. I had a client that was a clothing store and he discovered that 80% of his returns were the same items of clothing. So he just discontinued those and saved lots of money and lots of effort from his staff.

The third thing that I’d like you to be looking at is what’s profitable. You may be selling a lot of these things and taking up a lot of shelf space or you may have a dish on your menu that is selling but you’re not making a lot of profit from it. Now I realize the restaurant different is different because there are other things added on, but think about where your profit is coming from and make sure you know, and make wise decisions about why you’re keeping these less profitable items on your menu or on your shelf.

This is Judi Otton with GrowthCast and I’ll be back next week with a new Fiscal Fitness Tip of the Week.