Business end-of-year checklists are vital to running a successful business. The list, which includes preparing financials, compiling reports, and setting goals, are a significant part of closing the business year. Meeting all goals on your year-end checklist helps owners ensure all crucial processes are covered, reflect on key metrics from the past, and prepare well for the upcoming year ahead.
The end-of-year days are busy because there are hundreds of unfinished jobs to be completed within strict deadlines. When managers rush through these duties to finish tasks on time, productivity may come at the expense of efficiency. The more focus on completion, the lesser attention is paid to data verifications and reconciliations, resulting in incorrect data recorded and incorrect conclusions drawn. Leveraging equipment rental software can help streamline business priorities and ensure task completion efficiently with automated reports for informed decision-making.
Here’s how equipment rental software can help your business achieve year-end tasks:
Table of Contents
Verify invoices and receipts
Reviewing books thoroughly and highlighting any outstanding invoices or payments is the first crucial task at the year-end. This requires checking sales orders and payments to make sure customers made timely payments. If any invoices are still outstanding, contact the customers to discuss late payments and new due dates.
Once all invoices are paid, business managers can then verify invoices with receipts for the year. When invoices are sent to customers, it is often partially paid, or returned for damages. This is why receipts are made for partial payments or damaged fees. It is then important to verify how many orders are partially or fully paid and reported accordingly.
Businesses deal with thousands of orders in a day. It is manually impossible to reconcile each invoice. Equipment rental software can help businesses generate automated invoices for partial, complete, or return orders. The customer payments are also recorded with pending or paid tags so it is easier to keep track of which payments are paid or due.
Review business financial statements
Financials provide full visibility into how the business has been performing all year round. The ability to generate profits and incur few expenses are elements of good financials. This is why it is important to review financial statements for error-free and accurate record keeping.
A detailed analysis of business income generation and expense calculations can be helpful to figure out if the business is spending too much on payrolls or too little on marketing while also allowing your business to measure its impact on revenues.
It is not necessary to dig into every minor detail to perform a thorough financial review. Identifying important business KPIs can help measure the effectiveness of processes and their impact on finances as a whole. Dashboard view in equipment rental software can help set various KPIs and track these the minute you login into the system. Set revenue generated per product, inventory stock at various locations, profit margins, or increase in customer base as dashboard KPIs for quick analysis on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis.
Suppose the weekly revenue KPI shows below-margin results, business managers can view its details by clicking on the KPI. The revenue details page will enlist revenue generated from orders for managers to view, analyze shortfalls and plan accordingly.
Generating year-end reports
As the company year comes to a close, it is time to generate year-end reports to reflect on how well financial targets have been achieved. Reports represent data in a meaningful way to compare how important metrics improved or increased over the year.
Analyzing the information in reports can help your business interpret which strategies were successful in maximizing revenues and which were unsuccessful. Business managers use equipment rental software to run automated reports on sales, inventory, and customers. The report data in the software can be adjusted by applying filters and columns based on business requirements. Once generated, it can be used as is or converted into graphs for better analysis.
The reports can also be customized to see their correlation with different key metrics. For example, the sale report can have an additional column on advertising to know how much the sales have increased due to advertising.
Revisit 2022 goals and achievements
Evaluating the goals written down for the current ending year is essential to know how well the business has achieved them. Review these goals with business financials and reports in tandem with business plans and strategies for the current year to get a detailed and realistic picture of exactly where your business stands at the end of year.
Start with answering the Whats, Hows, and Whys of each goal to understand how effective these goals were. For example, what were the strategies implemented for the revenue-maximizing goal, how successfully the team was able to achieve the set revenue targets and why did any team face shortcomings to achieve these goals?
The detailed assessment of these goals will direct your business to decide if the business exceeds the goals, meets them, or falls short. Knowing what the business has achieved can be a milestone for 2022 and what it could not achieve can be adjusted going forward.
Action plan for the year ahead
After all documentation and assessments, the business is ready to step in the year ahead with revised goals and action plans. Completing the business end-of-year checklist will assist business managers to evaluate the business’ financial and overall standing in the competitive environment. Reflecting on the shortcomings of the previous year’s goals can be a push start for devising strategies on how to overcome these challenges combined with a business market plan that caters to overall competitive market analysis for the year ahead.
Author Bio:
Nisma Shakil is currently a Content Marketer at EZRentOut, the leading equipment rental software company, where she particularly enjoys writing about technological advancements, and trends and actively contributes to similar guest posting opportunities. She also enjoys capturing scenic beauty, beach sunsets, and family movie times.
