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All successful people in life share one thing in common and that one thing is their successful elevation started with a goal.  It doesn’t matter where you’re located or how old your objective is because many times having a strategic goal makes the difference between success or failure in business. Accounting goals are even more vital because every stage of a business needs to produce stellar financial results to succeed. All successful people in life share one thing in common and that one thing is their successful elevation started with a goal.  It doesn’t matter where you’re located or how old your objective is because many times having a strategic goal makes the difference between success or failure in business. Accounting goals are even more vital because every stage of a business needs to produce stellar financial results to succeed.

Without an accounting goal for your business finances, you have no way to know how or when you’ve met or exceeded your business objectives. Your business goals keep your business moving forward and helps contribute to your success. 

It’s been said that if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll more than likely end up somewhere else.  Read on to discover how to improve your business results by setting strategic accounting goals for 2020.

Measurable and Realistic Goal Settings

Strategic goals in business provide you with a roadmap to follow so you can grow and develop your business. Accounting goals help you develop financial objectives that impact every business decision you make. Internal reporting also has to be completed effectively and efficiently if you want to implement measurable and realistic business goals. Any measurable business goal needs back-up documentation. The back-up documentation you’ll need to create for your business goals include, but aren’t limited to:

• A budget which accurately lists all of your business expenses and income
• Your initial costs with line-item breakdowns that include business permits, office supplies, etc.
• A business’s fixed costs include insurance, loan payments, etc.
• Business’s variable costs include things like employee wages, advertising, etc.
• You want your business to have an accurate and ongoing cash flow financial statement

You can achieve realistic business goals by working through and determining the financial transactions listed above with the help of an exemplary bookkeeper or accountant service.

How to Set Short-Term and Long-Term Business Goals

Goals for any business event or action are usually broken down into two different types. The short-term and long-term goal. Before learning how to set each of these goals, it’s important to understand their definition and what each of them provides your business.

A short-term goal is defined as something you want to do soon. Most of the time, the near future is defined as this week, month, or year. As long as you set the short-term goal and achieve it in a short amount of time that you define, you have effectively met the definition of a short-term goal.

A long-term goal is an objective you accomplish in the future that takes time and planning to achieve. Many times a long-term goal can be many years in the future because you can’t possibly accomplish them in a short period. You want your short-term and long-term goals to be measurable and achievable within the allotted time frame you give it. 

Accounting Goals

If there is one thing in business, you can’t ignore it’s your financials. There’s no such thing as a successful company that ignores or refuses to set their financial goals and objectives. Once you start implementing strategic financial and accounting goals, you have a direction that lets you know how much and when you can achieve your goals.

It’s not easy to determine a business’s financial needs, but it serves as the foundation for business growth and development. A realistic budget helps drive your business forward until you start having positive cash flow. It doesn’t make any difference what your accounting goal is if it cannot be a measurable one.

If you’re unhappy with where you are at in succeeding in accomplishing your goals, you need to find out what is wrong and who is responsible for the goal. Try to discern what the person responsible or you can do differently. Re-evaluate any of the working tasks you assigned in achieving your short-term or long-term accounting goals, and if it’s not working, then align yourself to a work task that’s attainable and realistic.

It’s called root-cause analysis, and it helps you to determine what’s not working and what needs to be changed so it can work.

Implementing Your Business Goals

A bookkeeper, accountant, or both best meet your finance or accounting goals. That’s because both the bookkeeper and accountant are professionals who have a trained and systematic way of figuring out the financial problems inherent in any business. Both professionals are trained to review the business steps that need to occur to fix any financial problem. 

A small business can easily start turning a steady profit in about two to three years. The businesses that open and close each year, hovers around ten to twelve percent, which is a break-even rate. But there are ways you can motivate your business team to help grow and steady your business’s income, so you don’t fail.

Motivation and Incentives for Achieving Your Business Goals

Every company comes up with its unique motivation and incentives to have their team members help them meet business goals and objectives. The incentives can be giving certain workers recognition, which is considered a key component in determining how much your employee will engage in and perform for your business. Another incentive to help motivate your workers is in what you offer in variable pay. 

Variable pay is when you tie a worker’s performance or contribution to reaching a targeted revenue you want for the company, and when they do, you pay them a bonus or commission. Other incentives include offering benefits like health insurance. No matter which incentives you use, you want to keep incentives simple, easy to implement and achievable for your workers to target.

Your Next Step

Your next step may be your most important one. You cannot achieve your business accounting goals without having the professional bookkeeping or accounting team member behind it. Every successful entrepreneur has a dedicated team behind them and the team you acquire to help you grow and develop your business can make the difference between succeeding or failing. 

Do you have all the information you need to set your goals for the year?

Call us, let us help you set up the goals for your company at 780-439-9457.  We would like to help you achieve your business’ end goal objective of making a profit. Take this first step in achieving your accounting goals because while that’s the hardest step to take, in the end, its the one that will take you the farthest.