New Zealand makes it genuinely easy to start a business. Register a company, open a bank account, and you are trading. The hard part is not the paperwork. It is making sure the financial foundations are in place so that the business you are building actually has a chance.

Here is what to get right ...

If you are already using Xero, these reports are sitting right there waiting for you. The question is whether you are getting anything useful out of them.

These five reports give you a complete picture of how your business is performing, where your money is, and whether the wheels are starting to c...

One of the vital elements of any business is the relationships you build. Therefore when it comes to managing and understanding your business as a whole, it is the relationships with those business parties such as your accountant that should receive the regular attention they deserve. As a valued cl...

The bookkeeper of ten years ago spent most of their time processing invoices and reconciling bank statements. That role still exists, but it is a fraction of what a good bookkeeper does today.

If you have the right person in your corner, here is what you should be getting.

• Someone who underst...

The end of March tends to involve a flurry of activity. Stocktakes, last-minute invoicing, getting everything across the line before the financial year closes. Then April 1 arrives and, for a lot of business owners, the new year just sort of starts without much thought.

That is a missed opportunity...

Your business produces numbers constantly. Revenue, margins, expenses, cashflow, debtor days. The question is not whether the data is there. It is whether you are using it.

Here are ten practical ways to get more value from the numbers in your business.

1. Understand what your key reports are actu...

Cash flow for small business is like blood for our bodies. No lesser light than Sir Richard Branson said exactly that:

“Never take your eyes off the cash flow because it’s the life blood of business”

You would think that such sound advice from an astute and experienced doyenne of the global busine...

Wondering how your brick and mortar retail business can thrive, rather than merely survive?

You don’t need me to tell you that retail in the digital age is a major challenge for store owners. I don’t pretend to hold ALL of the answers, but it helps to listen to some of the best in the business.

Pi...

Recently, we looked at the importance of data and how gaining insights from this data is the first change that retail store owners must make.

But there’s a second change required to thrive at retail in the digital age.

This is to prioritise the customer experience above practically everything else...

A lot of business owners feel uncomfortable with the financial side of what they do. Not because they are not smart, but because nobody ever explained it to them in a way that made sense.

That discomfort is worth addressing. You do not need to love numbers to run a successful business. But you do n...

Starting a business is exciting and overwhelming in roughly equal measure. There is so much to think about that it is easy to skip over a question that actually matters a lot in the early stages.

Should you focus on building profit, or on managing cashflow?

The answer depends on where your busines...

One of the most effective ways to improve cashflow in your business does not require you to win more clients or raise your prices. It just requires you to get paid faster for the work you are already doing.

Accounts receivable, the money your clients owe you, is where a lot of cashflow goes missing...