Twenty years ago, I left a big company to work for myself providing consulting services to small business. The consulting company is called EmPower Resources, Inc., which provides management, financial and human resource services. The first thing I did when the company was organized was to purchase and set up QB. It is a good product that millions of companies and individuals use. It becomes even better when coupled with knowledge of bookkeeping and accounting.

In 1992 I received my MBA from James Madison University after four years of part-time study. I have worked with numerous accounting folks who did great jobs doing all of the detailed work required for corporate accounting. In 1996, I was on my own. I needed to take my MBA education and apply it to my own company. For the accounting issues, QB met the need. EmPower survives today, and has helped other companies become successful with most of them using QB.

Beyond the checking account and tax preparation value QB provides, small company owners are challenged to use all of the data (project, cost, revenue, profit, etc.) that QB accumulates. QB has numerous pre-made reports that can be generated, and users can create and memorize their own reports. The information can then be exported to xlsx or csv format. I’ll discuss issues with the xlsx format challenges in a future post. Expecting a small business owner to use all of the data in marketing, operations and financial aspects is daunting.

Using a few of the reports, I helped a two-year old company get back on track after I helped them start the company. Business seemed good, but they were short on cash. I found that they needed to raise prices as their margin had reduced after a few years of inflation. It isn’t that easy to raise prices, but we found a way to do that. I also showed them that their Accounts Receivable had started at 5 days and now was 45 days. One of the owners set collections as a much higher priority so cash could be generated.

So how does that owner use the data for maximum benefit? One way is for the owners to do the analysis themselves, and the TRANSDATA™ Platform is just what one needs for a simpler way to do analytics. Another way is to get accountants and consultants to do the analysis for them. It is costly and it also would likely be a slower iterative process.

I use the TRANSDATA™ Platform, and am always looking for new ways to “eat our own dogfood”. Please contact me at msakurada@blueflashsolutions.com, for more information.