The retail business landscape is demanding. Despite the perceived simplicity of running a retail business, there is a whole lot more that goes into the process of running a store successfully that goes beyond purchasing inventory and selling certain types of goods to customers. As retailers navigate an increasingly saturated market, with the US retail sector accounting for $2.6 trillion in sales, small business owners must regularly consider their current business operations and actively seek ways to improve. Whether you’re struggling with profitability or simply looking for ways to transform your retail business, many of these problems are caused by a lack of visibility into finances. In these scenarios, many successful businesses start from the ground up. By that, they start with investing in proper accounting tools—and so can you. Here are several ways that accounting software (and better financial habits) can help transform your retail business so that you can make better, smarter business decisions to outpace the competition. Start With a Plan in Place Rule number one: avoid jumping in without proper planning. Before you start securing funding or renting an office space, it’s important to have a business plan ready to go. Retail small businesses, in particular, need to face a tough question: how will their business not only survive but do well in the retail landscape? A good, well-thought-out business plan consists of some (if not all) aspects of the Business Model Canvas, which asks critical questions like: What do I need to do well to make money? What are the key cost drivers for the business? How is the business earning revenue from customers and delivering the value proposition? Another key part of planning for your retail business is looking at costs. Starting a bookkeeping business plan will enable owners to ask those tough, unbiased financial questions. And because securing outside financing is a key part of starting a retail business, the plan can be a way to document your business so that it’s ready to attract future investors to your retail business. Documenting a bookkeeping business plan also forces you, as the owner, to really get to know the numbers that make up your business, including understanding where purchases and receipts come from, where and when payments need to go, as well as setting aside time to celebrate sales and opportunities. Go Digital with Accounting Software to Make Selling Easier The line between brick-and-mortar and online businesses are blurring day by day. As offline stores increasingly shift to digital and digital-native brands establish physical stores to serve as pick-up locations and/or branding, it is clear that e-commerce has become the trend for 2020 and beyond. So, that begs the question: if the rest of your business is going digital, why wouldn’t your bookkeeping? The shift to cloud accounting software can transform your retail business in many ways, with or without the help of your accountant. These include: Eliminating the Manual Aspects of Tracking Manually tracking expenses and tax deductions is the last thing business owners want to do after a long day at work. Instead of looking for receipts and researching eligible deductions at the end of the day, retail business owners can use accounting software to automate these redundant tasks throughout their day. Letting software manage redundant, administrative tasks also provides extra time for business owners to work on other aspects of their business like marketing, branding, and client relations. Here’s how TrulySmall Accounting can help: Researching and calculating deductions can be extremely time-consuming and is far too easy to make costly mistakes, especially if you’re exhausted or have no previous financial background. Sync your business bank account to TrulySmall Accounting and let our systems pull a year’s worth of transactions from your bank account. From there, TrulySmall Accounting automatically categorizes all of your transactions to help you maximize tax deductions and minimize mistakes. We also use machine learning like OCR to read and match receipts to business transactions. The more you use TrulySmall Accounting, the smarter TrulySmall Accounting gets in matching these transactions and client details for you. Effortless, Smarter Client Invoicing Invoicing customers is the first step to getting paid on-time. Although not the most glamorous task, business owners are much more likely to remember to invoice if a habit of checking their books regularly has been formed. Here’s how TrulySmall Accounting can help: Retail business owners get access to smarter invoicing with TS Accounting. TS Accounting will automatically match payments and deposits to customer records. For example, once you’ve created an invoice within TS Accounting, any corresponding payment transactions will be matched with a green “Match Found” badge, so that you don’t have to sort through and match them yourself. As a client becomes recurring, TS Accounting will learn your business and its clientele to help make the next time you invoice that much quicker. Access Your Finances From Anywhere Shifting accounting to the cloud allows retailers the ability to access financial information from anywhere in the world. As long as business owners have a digital device to log on, you can categorize expenses, upload receipts (by dragging and dropping), pull critical numbers, and export financial reports straight from TS Accounting’s software. Understand the Profitability of Your Retail Business A 2018 Retail Benchmark Report by Vend stated that US small and medium businesses process approximately 482 transactions per month. With these numbers growing by the second, especially through the way retail businesses operate following the COVID-19 pandemic, the ability to understand profitability is critical to success. Numbers can get complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. Business owners want a way to understand their business and its financial health. As your retail business grows, transactions will increase and a time will come where you need a straightforward, intuitive dashboard to make sense of these numbers. Here’s how TrulySmall Accounting can help: Get an accurate and up-to-date look at how your business is doing with TS Accounting’s brand new intuitive dashboard. Visually see the numbers that matter like income vs. expense, net income, top business expenses, and current account balances and even compare numbers by the year or month. Within seconds, you can visualize what these numbers mean for your retail business so that you can make smarter decisions on things like whether or not you need to cut down on rent, recruitment or promotional activities, or focus your efforts on the other areas of the business that directly impact profitability. Focus On Running Your Business & Let Us Do The Work Properly planning, going digital with the help of accounting software, and really understanding the profitability of your business are all solid habits to build when running a retail business. Never miss out on another deduction or take unnecessary steps to understand business finances again. Let TrulySmall Accounting take over the heavy-lifting so that you can work smarter, not harder.
