Tag Archives: canada business

5 Tools to Facilitate the Management of your Business

February 25, 2023 The Silo Leave a comment

Running a business can be a challenging task, especially when you are dealing with multiple tasks and responsibilities at the same time. Fortunately, many tools can help streamline your business operations and make management much easier. In this article, we will take a look at five such tools that can help you manage your business more efficiently.

A personalized ERP

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning, and you may opt for an ERP business application. It is a type of software that helps businesses manage their day-to-day operations by integrating and automating various business functions, such as finance, accounting, inventory, sales, and human resources, into a single system. ERP software provides real-time visibility into all business processes, enabling businesses to make informed decisions based on accurate data.

Slack

Slack is a communication tool that helps teams collaborate more effectively. It allows you to create channels for different projects or teams, which you can use to share files, send messages, and hold virtual meetings. Slack integrates with many other tools, such as Trello and Google Drive, making it an ideal choice for businesses that rely on multiple tools for their operations.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool that allows you to track and analyze your website’s performance. It provides valuable insights into your website’s traffic, such as where your visitors are coming from, what pages they are visiting, and how long they are staying on your site. This information can help you optimize your website and improve your online presence.

QuickBooks

QuickBooks is an accounting software that can help you manage your finances more effectively. It allows you to track income and expenses, create invoices, and manage payroll. QuickBooks also integrates with many other tools, such as Trello and Google Sheets, making it easy to manage your finances and other business operations from a single platform.

HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer service platform that can help you manage your business more efficiently. It includes a CRM (customer relationship management) tool, email marketing, social media management, and much more. HubSpot’s powerful tools can help you automate your marketing and sales processes, and improve your customer engagement.

Trello

Trello is a project management tool that helps teams collaborate and stay organized. It is a visual tool that lets you organize your projects into boards and lists, with cards for each task. You can assign tasks to team members, set due dates, and track progress. Trello is great for managing projects of all sizes, from small tasks to large, complex projects.

Managing a business can be overwhelming, but with the right tools, it can be much easier. ERP, Trello, Slack, Google Analytics, QuickBooks, and HubSpot are just a few of the many tools available that can help you manage your business more efficiently.

By using these tools, you can streamline your operations, improve communication, track performance, manage finances, and much more. So, give these tools a try and see how they can help you manage your business more effectively. For the Silo, Bill Gordon.

Finance

7 Serious Tips for Better Bookkeeping in Canada

February 20, 2023 The Silo Leave a comment

Bookkeeping is tedious for most business owners unless you are a seasoned accountant or a fan of working with numbers. That is because businesses have a lot of financial details that need to be recorded, for instance, which supplier should be paid, outstanding customers, equipment to buy, significant purchases to make, and more. Without an accounting and bookkeeping system, you may lose essential business data, miss important goals, or make uninformed decisions that may affect your company’s finances.

Proper money-handling strategies are integral in any business as it helps you keep track of your long-term goals, improve your profits, and streamline seasonal cash flow changes. In addition, it will help your business stay out of trouble with the Internal Revenue Service or IRS.

By adopting good bookkeeping habits, you can avoid costly errors when it comes to record keeping. You can opt to have an in-house team to handle all your bookkeeping services, but this can be un-economical for small business owners. To save on cost, you can work with a bookkeeping agency, which often offers professional online and virtual services in Canada at very fair rates.

Here are seven tips for better bookkeeping for businesses in Canada.

Separate Your Business and Personal Finances

If you are a sole business owner, you should learn to separate your personal and business accounts. This will help you maintain records of every business and personal spending and help you keep the boundary to alleviate eating into the business growth finances.

For limited liability companies, the business is a separate entity from you, and your finances should be kept separate. That means you need to know which assets belong to the business and which are yours. By eliminating all personal transactions from the business accounts, you will lower the number of transactions the bookkeeper needs to categorize and reconcile. Additionally, your tax preparation and filing process will be seamless. You can find a bookkeeper in Canada to help you separate your accounts and provide outsourced business and personal bookkeeping services.

Control Your Business Credit

One of the common signs of an insolvent business is the inability to make payments promptly. The company may need better credit scores, lack of funding, or challenges in fulfilling its working capital needs.

When your business depends on bank financing to fund everyday operations, you will need help to pay back your high-interest debt. Therefore, you need to do due diligence before taking external funding.

You should set strict deadlines for your clients to pay what they owe and consider blocklisting repeat offenders that are taking advantage of you. Eliminate any late payments, as it is just like an interest-free loan. Your business may quickly become a cash-flow crisis if you lack rigorous credit control.

Track Business Expenses

Business expenses may be claimed against tax; therefore, tracking them is crucial if you want to cut overhead and maintain a healthy cash flow. You should always use a business credit card and keep records of expenses based on business activity.

Categorizing your expenses can be crucial, especially when your business is undergoing an CRA audit. The numbers on tax returns are often estimates, and these records help offer supporting evidence. Always remember that even trivial expenses will add up, and having records of everything can be helpful in the long run.

Overspending negatively affects any business; hence, keeping track of your expenses will ensure you track all your expenditures. Always remember that every dollar that you spend takes the business one step away from making a profit. Therefore, when running a business, keep a close watch on all your expenses, understand the benefit you gain from each expense, and document everything carefully. With outsourced online bookkeeping services, you can keep track of all your business expenses and maintain good records.

Schedule Routine Bookkeeping Times

As a business owner, you are handling many things at once, which can eat into the time you can use to monitor your financial record books.

The best way to keep your accounts is by consistently scheduling times to balance your books or working with a bookkeeping company in Canada. You can set aside time when your credit card statement is due and check through your monthly transactions to ensure everything is accurate. Although this task will take about one or two hours, it will simplify your life during the tax season by making tax preparation and filing much more effortless.

Create Budgets For Your Expenses And Set Financial Goals

Planning for business expenses, especially significant purchases, can help you best utilize your business resources and credit while giving you the peace of mind you need. Setting up and reviewing business budgets is directly related to the success of your business.

According to research, small businesses that regularly review their budgets on a weekly, monthly, and annual basis have success rates of 95%, 75%, and 25%, respectively. Therefore, if you want your business to succeed, you must have relatively high unused credit balances. In addition, you should also ensure your budget is monitored regularly, understand the benefits of using credit for your company, and be able to earmark the right amount of business payroll expenses.

Automate Manual Processes

One of the best accounting tips for growing businesses and start-ups is automating routine bookkeeping. Most accounting and bookkeeping activities are repetitive, and automating them will make your work easier and seamless.

Some repetitive bookkeeping processes you can automate include paying employees’ salaries monthly, following up on late invoices, and tracking invoices you send to customers. In addition, you can also automate the calculation of mileage payments for employee reimbursements and document utility bills in a central database.

Business owners can make life much easier by utilizing unified accounting project management solutions to help track expenses, automatically send invoices, and generate customized reports.

Consider Hiring a Tax Accountant

Investing in a seasoned tax accountant near me can be valuable for your business, even if the professional commits just a few hours every week or month to work on your small business bookkeeping and accounting needs.

A certified bookkeeper will record income and expenses and categorize them for a specified period. Conversely, a chartered accountant will help file your business taxes and set up your business’s accounting backbone. A reputable bookkeeping company will have certified tax consultants near me ready to assist you.

With an expert bookkeeper or chartered accountant handling all financial tasks, business owners can focus entirely on their business to attract customers and satisfy existing clients. They can also develop new products and services and grow their business.

Final Thoughts

Bookkeeping is a necessary evil that businesses cannot escape because almost everything depends on it. With an accurate and robust accounting system, you will get information about the business’s cash flow, performance, and financial condition, and it will help you make informed financial decisions. With the tips mentioned above in mind, you can ensure your small business bookkeeping records are available and can make better decisions for your business. You can also eliminate the headache of bookkeeping by outsourcing this function to a certified bookkeeper to help you out. Having a safe pair of skilled hands providing bookkeeping services for small businesses will give you, as the business owner, the confidence and freedom to lead from the front by focusing more on growing your business.

Finance

Threat to Prosperity: Canada Should Mind Business Investment Gap

August 16, 2022 The Silo Leave a comment

August, 2022 – Business investment in Canada is so weak that capital per member of the labour force is falling, and the implications for incomes and competitiveness are ominous. Governments, particularly the federal government, need to get serious about growth to get workers more of the tools they require to compete and thrive, according to a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute.

In “Decapitalization: Weak Business Investment Threatens Canadian Prosperity”, authors William B.P. Robson and Mawakina Bafale write that since 2015 Canada’s stock of capital per available worker has been declining and its rate of gross investment per worker has been well below that in the United States and other OECD countries.

They examine why Canada might be lagging as well as what action to take.

“Business investment and productivity are closely related: productivity growth inspires investment by creating opportunities, and investment drives productivity growth by equipping workers with more and better tools,” says Robson. “Investment per available worker lower in Canada than abroad tells us that businesses see less opportunity in Canada, and prefigures weaker growth in Canadian earnings and living standards than in other OECD countries.”

New investment per available worker in Canada, adjusted for purchasing power, was only slightly above 50 cents for every dollar of investment per available United States worker in 2021 – lower than at any point since the beginning of the 1990s. In addition, in 2022, OECD projections show that Canadian workers will likely enjoy only 73 cents of new capital for every dollar enjoyed by their counterparts in the OECD excluding the US, according to Robson and Bafale.

The authors’ calculations from OECD projections for 2022 show $20,400 of new capital per available worker this year for OECD countries excluding the United States, compared to $14,800 for Canada.

In other words, new capital per available worker in Canada will be more than one-quarter less than in those countries this year.

Declines in the stock of machinery and equipment (M&E) and intellectual property (IPP) per member of the workforce are particularly worrisome, the authors explain, because those types of capital may be particularly important for economy-wide productivity. “Whatever special messages the recent M&E and IPP numbers may convey, the message from stocks of business capital overall is clear: the average member of Canada’s labour force began 2022 with less capital to work with than she or he had in 2014,” says Bafale.

Robson and Bafale identify a few probable causes for Canada’s dismal investment performance. These include: weak business in the natural resource industries; restricted access to finance for small and mid-size firms; a loss in Canada’s competitive edge in business taxation, notably against the United States; an uncongenial environment for IP investment; regulatory uncertainly; unpredictable fiscal policy; and governments’ in-house spending and transfers to households that are steering resources into consumption and housing rather than non-residential investment.

Is business investment capital trajectory predetermined?

“The prospect that Canadians will find themselves increasingly relegated to lower value-added activities relative to workers in the United States and elsewhere, who are raising their productivity and earnings faster, should spur Canadian policymakers to action,” conclude Robson and Bafale. “The first step is to recognize that recent trends are a symptom of threats to Canada’s prosperity and competitiveness – that low business investment is a problem that governments can and should address.”

Supplemental- Are you a small Canadian business frustrated with the difficulties involved in accessing capital? For example, our experience has shown that the multitude of Business Development Corporations operate with autonomy but without accountability, poor vision and nepotism. Essentially, gleaning business plans and strategies before revealing ‘jump through these application hoops” which include personal finance and personal life details. It is sobering to discover that they also receive a hefty commission % for every applicant they ‘certify as successful’. Do you agree or have you had a more positive experience? We want to hear from you in the comments below.