Hit your financial goals by setting some and reporting against them.

Every business should have some financial goals and you want to be using a system that helps you to manage your actual results against your targets.

What we find, is that the understanding of the financial make-up of a business is enhanced significantly when you set targets and then report against those targets and get curious about the variances.  Some good tips for establishing your financial targets are:

1. Start with a review of the strategy of your business
2. Set some targets around the key drivers for your business (eg no of customers, productivity)
3. Use excel or another spread-sheeting program to “play” with your numbers and create some what-if scenarios
4. Prepare a bottom up budget for your overheads (day to day running costs)
5. Once this is done you can then easily import the targets into Xero
6. Customise reports in Xero to optimise the reporting and then use of your financial goals
7. Run reports each month and get curious about your variances

For a video on how to import budget data into Xero click here