Not sure what to see at the Accounting Business Expo 2017? This short series of posts by industry experts reveals their top picks from more than 80 sessions and 110 exhibitors. The Expo will be on March 21-22 in Darling Harbour, Sydney, showcasing the latest thinking in accounting careers, technology and business models. Check out the full program here.

Being the leader of a growing accounting/financial planning/insurance/bookkeeping firm is no easy task. Keeping pace with changes in legislation is a lot to deal with, let alone people management, marketing, technology and leadership.

It’s really exciting that Accounting Business Expo has some amazing sessions dedicated to leaders. Here are some of the sessions I’m really looking forward to.

 

Day 1 – Tuesday 21 March

Killer KPI’s For E-commerce Business – Anna Lee 11:00 am – 11:40 am

Understanding metrics that matter is super important for every business. As a leader the broader your knowledge and understanding of what drives people and industries the better placed you are to refine your own key metrics.

How to Nurture your Talent – not manage your Human Resources – Alex Haloulos 1:30 pm – 2:00 pm

Your people are your most important asset. I’m really looking forward to hearing ways to improve employee experiences and systems that help drive this.

Day 2 – Wednesday 22 March

Slack it to me! Creating a Culture of Innovative Communication – Tanya Titman 10:20 am – 10:50 am

We love Slack as our internal communication tool at growthwise. Especially love how it’s enabled us to build our learning culture. So I can’t wait to hear Tanya share stories about building bots and how Slack allows Consolid8 builds that into culture.

Expanding by Narrowing: How to ring focus to your Marketing – Matt Wilkinson 3:00 pm – 3:30 pm

The way we market has changed so much over the last few years and looks to change even more in the future. We all need to ensure our marketing is focused so I’m looking forward to the tips Matt has on how to nail this strategy.

Think Globally, Run Locally. The Art of Running a Distributed Team – Jason Andrew 3:30 pm – 4:00 pm

Jason has done a wonderful job of growing SmartBooks Online. Distributed teams are becoming the norm as people move, as the talent war heats up and as we all become much more global. I’m looking forward to Jason sharing the tools he uses, the challenges he has faced and the tips on how to overcome these.
It’s going to be a jam packed 2 days of content as well as the awesome exhibitors we get to see. If you don’t have your ticket yet (or tickets for your team), best get a move on!

We do so many manual things in our business that as we grow the time to fit in the important stuff disappears. And worse – we don’t work on improving how our business runs because it just seems too hard.

In the first post I introduced Zapier, one of my all-time favourite tools. Now I want to introduce you to If This Then That. It works exactly as the title would suggest.

If this happens then make that happen.

So there is always a trigger and an action. You can create connections between over 60 services so far. It’s similar to Zapier but has quite a few different services as well.

The difference? Well I use Zapier to connect more of my back-end business services. Such as send an automatic note to our internal messaging app Yammer as soon as someone’s invoice becomes overdue in Xero.

I use IFTTT more for organisation. I’m a big reader and encourage all of our clients to read blog posts and different articles for ideas, the latest news and to study what’s happening in the rest of the business world.

I like to follow up on the occasional article. Some I share with others (via Twitter/Facebook/Pinterest) and others give me an idea for a blog post. I read on my iPad and use an app called Feeddler RSS which creates a reading list from my favourite blogs. I’ve created the following IFTTT recipes:

• If I press the star button in Feedler, IFTTT automatically sends the post to social media broadcast app Buffer (this posts to Twitter and or Facebook depending on what I want)

• If I press #action IFTTT automatically sends it to digital note-taking app Evernote and puts it in my Action folder

• If I press #bi this automatically sends to my Evernote account and puts in it in my Blog Ideas folder

This then just organises everything for me so I can come back to it when I’m ready.

We also have a few reminder services setup to post things at certain times of the month and or day. Things like voting for employee of the month (the post is automatically delivered to Yammer). You can also automatically file attachments from Gmail just by clicking the forward button.

There are also some fun things you can create such as weather messages, saving your Instagram/facebook photos, etc. But the main thing is to save you time with the little tasks. The ones that happen regularly.

While the things that Zapier and IFTTT do seem small and would only save a tiny amount of time, think about how often you do these tasks. Think about the fact that some of them you just don’t do because you don’t have the time. Did you know saving six minutes per day equates to an extra half an hour a week, or an extra 1,560 hours per year? Yes that’s right. More than an entire day.

Another big advantage is just looking at things like Zapier and IFTTT. Looking at different options and what’s possible helps to stimulate the brain and think of other things you would automate that you now have to do manually.

Sometimes it’s the little automations that make the biggest differences.

A version of this post first appeared on the Growthwise blog.

I’m often asked what is the most important thing for running a small business. This question comes from both established businesses and startups. I always answer with the same response. Data.

People often say it’s a chore and a burden to complete a quarterly Business Activity Statement (BAS). In fact, looking at certain figures should be compulsory for small business on a weekly and monthly basis.

Without clear knowledge from your business’ data you may as well just go to the casino and put everything on black!

Gone are the days where you needed someone to analyse and collate all your business data. ‘Business intelligence’ tools were once so costly only the big boys could afford it. But with cloud software just about any business owner can have everything they need on a few dashboards.

For accounting (Xero), job management (GeoOP), staff rostering (Deputy), inventory (Unleashed), point-of-sale (Vend), etc. you can have everything you need at your fingertips. Combine that with automation tools such as Geckoboard or Grappster and you have both big picture and detail about your business with just a few clicks.

Data also needs to be timely. You should be looking at up-to-date figures not something that is three months old or later. I’m not just talking about a profit and loss report or balance sheet here. Yes, they are great at showing you profitability and some trends but they make up only a small portion of the entire picture.

Cloud software tools give you up-to-date data to streamline your business and can make such a huge difference.

So what are some of the things data can provide in your business? If your sales are based on an hourly rate have you ever stopped to look at your average hourly rate, including all hours worked as well as charged?

Have you looked at which clients are profitable and which products are profitable?

Have you compared your sales staff or production output between team members? Have you measured your conversion rate for new enquiries?

These are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to things you should be tracking in your business. Without data you are just flying blind.

We have seen businesses who start monitoring data with cloud software complete on average another job per day, increase average hourly rate by 35 percent, increase the overall margins on products and reduce staff wages as a percentage of sales.

See, what you measure improves. It becomes a focus and you look for ways of improving.

So how well do you know your data?

This is an edited version of a post on the Growthwise blog.