Category: Internet Business

Can Financial Window Dressing Help Your Business?


 

Financial managers can do certain things to increase or decrease net income that’s recorded in the year. This is called profit smoothing, income smoothing or just plain old window dressing. This isn’t the same as fraud, or cooking the books, though, just in case that thought had crossed your mind.

Most profit smoothing involves pushing some amount of revenue and/or expenses into other years than they would normally be recorded. A common technique for profit smoothing is to delay normal maintenance and repairs. This is referred to as deferred maintenance. Many routine and recurring maintenance costs required for autos, trucks, machines, equipment and buildings can be delayed, or deferred until later.

A business that spends a significant amount of money for employee training and development may delay these programs until the next year so the expense in the current year is lower. A company can also cut back on its current year’s outlays for market research and product development.

Some businesses might ease up on their rules regarding when slow-paying customers are written off to expense as bad debts or uncollectible accounts receivable. These businesses can put off recording some of their bad debts expense until the next reporting year.

A fixed asset that is not being actively used may have very little current or future value to a business. Instead of writing off the un-depreciated cost of the impaired asset as a loss in the current year, the business might delay the write-off until the next year.

You can see how manipulating the timing of certain expenses can make an impact on net income. This isn’t illegal although companies can go too far in massaging the numbers so that its financial statements are misleading. For the most part though, profit smoothing isn’t much more than robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Accountants refer to these as compensatory effects. The effects next year offset and cancel out the effects in the current year. Less expense this year is balanced by more expense the next year. The important thing is knowing how far to push the envelope in these kinds of maneuvers and keep yourself and your company out of trouble with the IRS, ’cause that kind of a problem you just don’t need.

 

The Keys To Success In Your Own Entrepreneurship


 

Fundamentals

Success in your own entrepreneurship – or small business – may depend on a lot of different things, and many an entrepreneur would achieve instant wealth if they had the formula that could be patented and sold to other entrepreneurs; but there is no such formula. Many so-called experts will tell you what does NOT work for achieving entrepreneurial success, instead of what does.

It has been said that success in business has nothing whatsoever to do with salesmanship, and little to do with a knowledge of your company’s products or services. That also is incorrect, because the lack of salesmanship or product knowledge will surely be a one-way ticket to the dump heap of so many other once-promising enterprises whose owners didn’t bother to learn how to deal with their market or convey to that market why their product was worthwhile.

While salesmanship and/or product knowledge will not be the only skills you need to succeed in business, when they are combined with other important and fundamental principles your success or failure at anything you do in life will certainly be determined. Those other principles are your A,B,C’s, Attitude, Belief and Consistency. Let’s take a closer look at these basics.

Attitude

Possibly the most important of the three principles mentioned above but useless on its own. It’s no good having the best attitude in the world if you sitting on one’s own in a closed room not talking to or exposed anyone else. So what is attitude apart from how one feels about oneself and others. Attitude can best be described as a shining through of your inner self.

Your face is transparent, totally transparent and your attitude shines through whether it’s positive or negative. The instant that a prospective customer sees you maybe even before you see him, your attitude comes through. The customer sees it, maybe only subconsciously and will react accordingly.

We all know that the first thing any salesperson has to sell is his/her self even s/he they begins to talk. If s/he can’t sell the public on who s/he is and what s/he represents then s/he might as well turn round and go home and go back to bed. If salespeople can’t sell themselves they wouldn’t be able to sell an iced cold drink to the most thirsty individual.

NAVAN Global, the REAL SEAL!

So when we get up in the morning and do our consistency things let’s get a really big warm smile from within feeling good about ourselves and keep that all day. When we go about our business we need to keep our good attitude with us. If we can’t also be in the place where we are physically there’s no point being there in the first place. It’s easier to ride a horse in the direction that it’s going.

Belief

An absolute and genuine belief in our business, it’s products and services and the benefits it can provide to ALL customers who use it. Belief is commitment. Total commitment to and in what you are representing to the marketplace. You have to be ready, willing and able to demonstrate to anyone in your presence how your product/service benefits YOU and your family; and why it is without question the best thing of its kind you have EVER seen in your life.

Consistency

We get up every morning, we brush our teeth wash, get dressed have breakfast. We are consistent in our actions. We do it every day. We need to do the same with the tasks associated with our business for the days that we have chosen we are going to work, be it 1 or 7 days a week. We need to take mental notes of each positive action we perform and be prepared to repeat it whenever necessary.

However, we need to do the same thing for the negative actions we took so we can avoid these kinds of actions at all costs. Developing good habits comes with repetition which means that we need to be consistent in positive actions, and just as consistent in the elimination of negative actions that can take down our enterprises. We need to concentrate on the actions not on the result. I’ll repeat that, we need to concentrate on the actions not on the results.

Methodical approach

When we go mountain climbing, if we would continually look at the summit we would soon trip up and fall. We need to concentrate on each small step at a time, one after the other and as surely as the sun goes down we will reach our summit. So the combination of all the important ingredients that determine your success or failure must be taken and utilized together in order to be effective.