Welcome back! Today is our final installment on internal controls and fraud series. Last week we took some time to look at a few different ways that fraud could be conducted on your business. This week we are going to look at a few ways you can proactively put in controls to help reduce the potential threat of fraud. There is no sure-fire way to tell if someone will or will not commit fraud against your business. Taking a proactive stance about internal controls is your bes

Welcome Back to week 2 of Finergy's Internal Controls and Fraud Series! Most people are honest, or so we like to believe. We hope that the people we come in contact with in our day-to-day lives are honest and trustworthy. Unfortunately, we learn over the course of life, that not everybody is honest and trustworthy. Since we never know who is and who isn’t, it is a good idea to take precautions in your business. Last week we had an introduction to internal controls and frau

Welcome back Finance Friends! Today we are going to launch our first Finergy Finance Series! Over the next three Finance Friday's we will be looking at a very important topic: Internal Controls and Fraud. Today is the first installment which will be an introduction to the topic. Every year companies big and small, public and private lose an estimated 5% of their revenues due to fraud. For small companies, this loss could have a detrimental impact on their ability to conti

Happy Finance Friday! We made it to May, summer is just around the corner! This week we are celebrating National Small Business Week. Small businesses of the Hudson Valley are a vital and vibrant part of our community. The region is full of businesses that enrich our region; farms, restaurants, breweries, wineries, local shops, lawyers, salons, accountants and so many more. Small businesses not only keep jobs in the region but they also bring in additional revenue to the r

Welcome back! Friday is here yet again, I know you are excited because it is Finance Friday! Recently, we looked at a couple of tools that we can use to improve our bookkeeping processes. One of the tools I mentioned was Excel. Today I’m going to share a few basic formulas and functions that are useful in Excel. In a few weeks, we will take a look at more advanced formulas/functions. Below you will find a screenshot from an Excel spreadsheet that I made for this blog. Excel

Hi Everyone! TGIFF! Thank you for coming by. Today we have a really fun topic to talk about, Invoicing! My first job after college was at a large company. I was hired as a financial analyst, and I was told I would be in charge of invoicing. Over the course of a couple of years, I handled over twenty different accounts. I had to understand each contract and how that contract translated into a billable invoice. In my role of a bookkeeper and as a small business owner, the s

This week’s Finance Friday is another addition of The Finergy Five! This week I am excited to bring you Five Financial Activities you should do every month. When you run your own business, there is a lot going on every day. It can be hard to keep up sometimes. Even when time is tight, you should do at least these five finance activities every month. If you find it hard to make the time, you can consider hiring a bookkeeper to help reduce the amount of time you need to spe

TGIFF! I am really excited about this Finance Friday entry. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I do. Today we are going to move from analyzing what has happened to predict what will happen. I worked as a financial analyst in corporate America for over eight years. In this role every month we went through what was called “The Close.” The Close is filled with long days of never-ending work. In finance and accounting, The Close process is used to record all the revenue and i

Hey There, thank you for stopping by. We finally made it to March. I am so excited that spring will be here in just a few more weeks. Over the last couple of weeks, we have taken the time to review our revenue and expenses today we are going to pull those two concepts together and talk about profit. How did you do? Profit is seeking to answer the basic question of ‘how did your business do?’ When you are running a business, you want to understand this so that you can assess

Welcome Back It’s Finance Friday yet again. I am happy that we are celebrating the last Friday of February. This weather has been amazing. I hope the Ground Hog was wrong and Spring will be early this year! is just around the corner now. Today we are going to look at accounts payable and how that impacts your cash flow. A few weeks ago we looked at accounts receivable and saw that accounts receivables brought cash into the company. This week we look at accounts payable.