Financial wellness key for business success

January is Financial Wellness Month and the perfect time to take a financial wellness assessment of your own business. Managing a small business is hard but rewarding work, and provides many returns to the owners, employees, customers, and clients.

Business finances are complex. It’s an ongoing process and time consuming to continually manage a company’s accounting and budgeting processes. While these tasks are important, they may not be the business manager’s area of skill or experience.

EDASC can help direct you to knowledgeable experts and programs supporting your financial management goals.

One recommendation is working with the Small Business Development Center (SBDC), which provides no-cost business management services. SBDC advisors can assist entrepreneurs and small businesses with financial essentials, such as how to create a budget, ways to develop financial projects and how to manage cash flow.

EDASC also provides resources for starting or operating a small business, and has a no-cost Market Research tool that can be used to improve overall business performance.

Technology Assistance

After getting a start on managing your business’s finances, it becomes important to manage these plans on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Applications have made it easier than ever for entrepreneurs and small-business owners to manage their finances. The following tools offer many advantages for solopreneurs and small business owners to manage company finances on their own.

Expensify

Expensify enables integration between its app, credit cards and debit cards. This way, expenses can be uploaded and managed without manual data entry.

FreshBooks

Service-based businesses will find the customizable invoicing features of FreshBooks to offer significant advantages. It includes invoice management, cloud-based bookkeeping and integrations with many other financial software programs.

Gusto

This app enables companies to manage payroll, tax and benefits. Gusto reports any new hires to the government, ensuring everything is in place during the onboarding process. It also handles state and federal taxes and emails digital pay stubs to employees. 

QuickBooks

QuickBooks remains a popular tool for small business accounting. It can sync with your bank accounts to make it easier to reconcile the books at the end of the month, manage invoices, keep track of vendor payments, and more. Most businesses can benefit from using this software daily or weekly, or at least monthly. Since QuickBooks is a full accounting software, it can take time to learn how to use it. 

Square

Square enables business owners to easily accept payments. It is possible to order a card reader that plugs into any smartphone, enabling business owners, salespeople, and employees to take payments on the spot. Doing so can improve cash flow by providing quick access to capital, rather than waiting for invoices to be mailed and paid at a later date. 

Wave

Small businesses looking for free accounting software should investigate the features offered by Wave, which provides solutions for accounting, invoicing and receipt scanning.

Xero

Xero is ideal for micro-businesses whose owners often wear multiple hats to keep operations running smoothly. Its cloud-based platform offers flexibility with a mobile app, along with payroll integration with Gusto and inventory management, all at a subscription rate that makes sense for small businesses. 

Find out how EDASC Can Help Your Business

New tech is changing the business landscape by making it possible for business owners to do more in less time. Still, technology cannot replace the benefit of sitting down with an expert.. Reach out to EDASC to connect you with financial resources that fit your needs. Contact us at 360-336-6114 or at office@skagit.org.