CrunchBoards Review: Real business advice, in real-time

One of the biggest advantages of working with Xero and the cloud is having instant access to the information you need. Xero’s daily bank feeds provide access to the latest financial data as soon as it’s available.

However, as a business owner you need more than just the standard Profit & Loss (P&L) and Balance Sheet to run your business. These financial statements don’t help you much in terms of making decisions in the here and now, to run your business.

And that’s where CrunchBoards comes in. Here are five ways we’re using it at Poole Group to provide timely, meaningful advice to our clients:

1. Flexibility
   CrunchBoards lets us design and implement a custom reporting tool for each client. No more trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And the reports can be amended to include only the information that you need for your business
2. The ability to prepare three-way forecasting—P&L, Balance Sheet and cashflow forecasts
   CrunchBoards’ three-way forecasting helps a business owner understand the cashflow and working capital implications of their P&L budgets. This means together we can identify and address potential cashflow issues before they become a problem.
3. Real-time reporting
   CrunchBoards syncs with Xero multiple times per day, and updates its reports immediately. These reports allow you to monitor your business’ cashflow and see well ahead of time any future implications of recent trading anomalies. This means you can put proactive (rather than reactive) plans in place. (And sleep better at night!)
4. The ability to include non-financial KPIs’ in the reporting
   The important numbers to track in your business are not all “financial” in nature are they? They don’t appear in standard financial reporting, but they’re important to track. Things like website traffic, new enquiries, conversion rate on quotes or proposals and so on. With CrunchBoards we can enter non-financial data like this and update your reports in minutes to provide you with real-time information on both financial and non-financial Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). So instead of having multiple reports with different purposes and information, you get the ease and clarity of having one report that covers all aspects of your business. Simpler is better
5. Relevant Information
   The traditional P&L and Balance Sheet focuses on what’s already happened, and is often months out of date when it’s finally produced. As a business owner you want to know what’s happening now, and what the implications are for the future. With CrunchBoards we can develop a reporting structure for you that monitors and focuses on relevant financial and non-financial KPIs to help you track and achieve your business objectives.

There’s no doubt that any business owner benefits from real-time reporting. It lets you monitor the current reality of your business—rather than some historical snapshot of it—which means you are able to take action sooner to better manage your cash flow and working capital.

But all that reporting is completely useless if the data isn’t up to date.

Keeping your business’ data up-to-date

You need to reconcile your data and keep it up to date with add-ons such as Receipt Bank and Chaser. And if you don’t have the time to do it yourself, then you should outsource the work to a bookkeeping service such as Zerobooks.

CrunchBoards is a key part of Poole Group’s passion for providing business owners with real advice in real-time using real data. If you’d like to have a chat about getting your business plugged into the cloud and the real-time data that’s available to you, let’s make a time to catch up over a coffee.