Author Archives: Kaitlin Kirk

How to Create a Simple Budget

Budgeting is something we don’t do enough of as small business owners. I think we either don’t have the data to be able to forecast next week, never mind next year, or we just don’t see the value in it.

Creating a budget is one of those things that’s important but not urgent, which makes it a tough sell for busy small business owners. We spend so much time putting out fires, trying to get the urgent things done, that it can be tricky to make space in our schedules for important but not urgent tasks.

If you set aside 30 mins this week to make a budget for the next twelve months, I promise it will help you to make better financial decisions.

Why do we budget?

Doing business without a budget is like going on a cross-country road trip without a map. You’re never sure when the next small town is going to come along. Sometimes that’s ok because you just put gas in the car, and sometimes that’s bad because you’re driving on fumes and you really need a bathroom.

Having a budget will allow you to plan for the future, to have a good idea of when your income will be generated and when your expenses will be incurred. With a plan, you can be a more agile business owner because you can react to the environment you’re in and know you’ll be ok.

You can make decisions based on facts and stop guessing – you’ll have a much better view of the future for your business.

It also allows you to save money for bigger purchases and to invest in the growth of your company. If you’re never able to invest in your company, whether it’s better equipment, spending more on advertising or being able to outsource, you’ll find that at some point you just can’t make any more progress.

Creating a budget can shed some light on you’re current spending. It might feel like you only spend a few dollars per month on sandwiches or apps, but it might actually be a few hundred. You can’t change what you don’t know, and often our feelings about money are very different from the facts.

Five Steps to a Simple Budget

Budgeting sucks, I get it. It’s like taking cough syrup or something. It tastes awful but it’s going to help our business get better.

Let’s try to get it done as fast as possible, because the sooner we have a budget, the sooner we can use it to guide our strategic decisions (I’ll explain this later).

Step One: How do you spend money?

Start by writing out a list of all the things you spend money on. Write down everything, even the really small stuff that seems insignificant.

If this is your first year in business, write out what you know you’ll spend money on and what you think you might spend money on. Try to keep it within the realm of “fairly likely” and don’t get to far into “maybe”. You want the budget to be as accurate as possible, and if you put too many uncertain expenses in, it’s unlikely the end result will be a true representation of what it will take to run the company over the next year.

If you’ve been in business a little while, pull out your income statement from last year. This will be super useful in creating this year’s budget because you can use what happened last year to help you estimate this year.

Step Two: How much do you spend?

The next step is to write down how much you spend on each thing every month. Maybe start a spreadsheet or create a table in notebook or something. I recommend creating columns for every month plus the total. Budgeting monthly will give you a more accurate picture than trying to budget for the year and then dividing by twelve.

Here’s an example:

Expense

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

June

July

Aug

Sept

Oct

Nov

Dec

Total

Telephone

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$65

$780

Water

$50

 

$50

 

$50

 

$50

 

$50

 

$50

 

$300

Office supplies

$10

$10

$10

$75

$10

 

 

 

 

$10

$10

$10

$145

In the example, I only get billed for water every two months, and I know I’m going to need printer ink in April (because tax season), so I increased my office supplies expense by the amount of printer ink. I also know it gets slower in the summer, so I probably won’t need to buy office supplies again until the fall.

Keep going until you have everything you spend money on and how much you spend on it. Use your income statement from last year to help you.

Try to research anything you don’t know so you can get the best number possible, but don’t stress about it.

In the end a budget is just an educated guess anyways.

Some costs will be difficult to estimate at this point because they’re directly related to sales. Like if you take credit cards, your transaction fees are directly related to the dollar amount processed. Just leave those for now.

Step Three: How do you make money?

Just like we did with expenses, list the ways in which you make money. For example, if you’re a gym owner, maybe some people pay you a monthly subscription fee. Maybe you also sell personal training packages, and nutrition supplements. List all of these things. If you’re not sure if you should list it, ask yourself if you would include it in any other category you’ve already got. If the answer is no, write it down. If the answer is yes, include it with the other item.

Step Four: How much money do you make?

Create a table similar to the one above, but this time for the thing(s) you make money from. How much do you expect to make every month? If you have your income statement from last year, I would use it to put in the months for this year. Then change whatever you know will be different. Maybe you signed a new client so this Jan will be higher than last Jan, or maybe a contract will be ending in March so April will be lower than last April.

If you’re new to business, you can leave these blank or take your best guess. I encourage you to only put in a number if it’s fairly certain. You’re better off projecting revenue that’s too low, than too high.

Step Five: Costs Related to Sales

Now that you have your sales numbers in place, you can calculate the expenses that are based on sales, like transaction fees, subcontractor expenses and other direct costs.

When you’re all done, the table should look something like this:

  Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sept Oct Nov Dec Total
Sales $250 $250 $400 $600 $300 $250 $150 $150 $250 $300 $400 $300 $3,600
Expenses                          
Telephone $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $65 $780
Water $50   $50   $50   $50   $50   $50   $300
Office supplies $10 $10 $10 $75 $10         $10 $10 $10 $145
Transaction Fees $8 $8 $12 $18 $9 $8 $5 $5 $8 $9 $12 $9 $108
Total Expenses $133 $83 $137 $158 $134 $73 $120 $70 $123 $84 $137 $84 $1,333
                           
Earnings before tax $118 $168 $263 $442 $166 $178 $31 $81 $128 $216 $263 $216 $2,267
Taxes (~15%) $18 $25 $39 $66 $25 $27 $5 $12 $19 $32 $39 $32 $339
Net Earnings $100 $143 $224 $376 $141 $151 $26 $69 $109 $184 $224 $184 $1,928

You’ll probably have more expenses and maybe more sales lines, but the format should be similar. I’ve estimated the income taxes at about 15%, but you should use your tax rate. It’s important to include taxes because otherwise they end up feeling like a surprise at the end of the year. Budgeting for income taxes will give you an idea of how much you need to save every month.

It’s done now, but what do I do with it?

Now that you’ve finished your budget, have a look at the year. Does it look the way you though it would?

Keep comparing your budget to your bookkeeping every quarter (or preferably every month). It’s important to understand where you’re going over budget and where you’re under budget. The sooner you recognize you’re straying from your intended course, the easier it is to make adjustments and avoid surprises.

Comparing the budget to your actual bookkeeping will help you find out where your financial strategy is missing the mark and how you can create a more accurate budget for next year.

If you’d like a hand with your budget I’d be happy to help you. You can fill out a contact form: https://www.kirkcpa.ca/contact

Kaitlin

P.S. Today we created a simple and straightforward budget. We’ve really just scratched the surface of budgets, have a look at “When Budgets Break Bad” for some insights on how budgets can go sideways and what to do about it.

Do You Need a Business Bank Account?

You’ve probably heard it before – “you need a separate bank account and credit card for your business.”

It’s true, you do.

But why? It makes everything harder! Money goes into the business account, but all your bills come out of your personal account. How are you supposed to pay for things like groceries if all of your money is in the business account?

I get it, I’m a small business owner too – my business income has to pay my personal expenses.

Whether you’re incorporated or a sole proprietor, you need a separate account.

As a sole proprietor, things are a bit simpler because everything you make goes on your personal taxes, so you can transfer money to your personal account without too much planning (besides some cash flow management, but that’s beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here).

Why does it need to be separate?

Having a clear line between your personal and business expenses, ensures you’re only claiming the business ones against the business income.

The Canada Revenue Agency isn’t going to let you deduct cat food if you’re a coach. Sorry about that.

On the other hand, you definitely want to deduct everything related to the business – if you don’t, you’re paying more in taxes than you need to. Nobody likes that.

Taxes are a huge reason to keep everything separate. Not only for the sake of compliance but also to save time. When the inevitable tax season comes around, you don’t want to be going through every bank statement for every bank account and credit card you have trying to pick out the expenses you think might be business related.

It’s time consuming, tedious, and honestly, it’s pretty unlikely you’ll make it through the whole exercise without making a mistake somewhere.

Trying to remember what you bought at Canadian Tire eight months ago is going to be a tough one, and if you can’t prove it was business related, you can’t deduct it for tax purposes.

Maybe you keep all your receipts and write on them to say what you bought and why. That’s great! That will definitely help to keep things separate. You’ll still have to go through and add up all of those receipts at the end of the year.

Pro tip: you can take a picture of receipts with your phone and toss out the paper. The CRA will accept digital copies as proof of purchase. Yay!

What if the business is incorporated?

Corporations are technically separate legal entities from their owners (a.k.a. shareholders), which means they for sure need their own bank account and credit card.

The corporation will need to pay tax on its income, and you’ll need to pay tax on what you receive from the business. When you have only one bank account, that makes things tricky. Where’s the line between business and personal?

Having a separate credit card makes life SO much easier. The fee on your bank account will be way less if you only have a few transactions every month, and you can use the credit card to pay for everything. I know it’s hard to get credit for the business, especially if you’re just starting out, but it can be as simple as just getting another card issued on your personal account. The important thing is to have another physical card that you only use for business. It will show up on your statement separately from the other card.

Are taxes the only reason?

Nope, it’s just the one with the biggest potential consequences.

Reporting will be difficult too if you only have one account. How much did the business make in net income? Will you have cash in the bank to pay your suppliers on time? If everything is in one account it will be tricky to know the answers to these questions, which makes it tricky to run the business efficiently.

If the business is a side-hustle and you still have a day job, you’ll have no idea if the business is making money if it’s not separate. You might be bankrolling the business and not even know it.

At that point it’s more of a hobby than a business, which is ok, but keeping your finances separate will give you all the facts.

What’s the take-away?

At the very least, the business should have its own bank account, and ideally a credit card too. It will be so much less stressful and time consuming when taxes inevitably roll around. Plus, if/when you start working with a bookkeeper or an accountant, you’ll save money because they’ll spend less time on your taxes. Win!

Kaitlin

Pricing Your Services: Facts vs Feelings

As an accountant I get asked “can you tell me the price I should be charging for my services?” and my short answer is no.

I can calculate the direct costs required to offer the service. I can tell you how much you’re spending on overhead, and I can even give you multiple ways to assign those overhead costs to your services. None of which is overly helpful in determining a price for you’re services.

Don’t get me wrong, those are all good things to know so you can be sure you’re covering your costs with the prices you do set. But I don’t recommend using them as the first things you consider.

Buying Pain Relief

Costs are only 10% of the information you need to price your services. The other 90% is the impact, or perceived value, for your customers.

If you only use your costs to come up with a price, you haven’t accounted for the impact your services have on your customer. A cost-based pricing strategy will always produce a lower price than a value-based strategy, which means you’ve left money on the table. Your customer would’ve happily paid you more than you charged them.

People will make a purchase to avoid pain more often than to gain something.

Think about the last time you bought something. Why did you buy it? Chances are it was to relieve or avoid some kind of pain. Maybe it was gas for your car to avoid the pain of walking for an hour to get work, or maybe it was an email marketing app to relieve the pain of spending hours trying to manually send emails.

When you decide to purchase a specific product or service, you do it because you believe the value (pain relief) you’ll receive is more than the money it will cost you.

That’s why it’s not an accounting question. It’s a psychology question. What is the perceived value of the service?

Buying is Emotional

This is not an easy question to answer because it’s all relative and the person setting the price feels differently about the service than the person buying it. Their perceived value is different than that of the customer’s.

On top of that, every customer will have a different perceived value, so setting one price for every customer won’t work. You’ll either be too high or too low for almost everyone.

If each customer will have different specific needs and a different maximum price they’re willing to pay, how do we get the best price for our services?

By conveying the value to your customer. The difference between the pain they feel now and how much better they’re going to feel after our work together.

All of this is to say, buying is an emotional decision and we need to account for the psychological factors at play. Big business spends millions every year to understand the best way to exploit those factors because we, as consumers, are mostly unaware of the way our brains process price.

I’m not saying you should be trying to trick your customers, I’m saying to convey the value per dollar you provide, you need to understand how our brains comprehend price.

Buying into Sales

As humans, our brains have a hard time understanding price as an absolute. It’s like if we had two kittens, and I asked you to tell me which one was heavier. You could lift them both and give me the answer without too much difficulty. You wouldn’t, however, be able to tell me that one of the kittens was exactly 900g because our brains can’t measure absolute values. (Want to see an version with octopuses? Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sr3Rqs42XE)

What they do measure is relativity, this year is better or worse than last year; today is hotter or cooler than the yesterday; this price is higher or lower than that one.

Big sales like Boxing Day and Black Friday are great days to look at examples of how businesses will use this to their advantage.

They use what’s called anchoring. They give us a higher price, the “original” price, put a slash through it with a lower price underneath, and post a big % off sign. That higher price is now anchored in our minds and the lower price seems like we’re getting more value for our dollar.

Canadian Tire does this to the extreme. There are items that say 95% off on the tag. Did they ever really sell that can opener for $75? Probably not. In fact, the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price” is almost always fictional.

Aeropostale for example, always has a sale on – they don’t ever actually sell their clothing for the non-sale price.

Anchoring is so effective our brains don’t even care if the higher priced item is related to what we’re buying. There’s a restaurant in the UK that has a scooter on their menu for $15,000. That scooter has nothing to do with the food they serve, but the $15,000 price tag makes everything on the menu seem relatively cheaper.

Buying a Feeling

I’m not suggesting you offer a scooter for sale on your website, I’m not suggesting you inflate your prices so you can use fake discounts. I’m not even suggesting you use discounts. What I’m saying is our brains don’t measure price logically, so we need to account for that in the way we price and the way we convey value.

The take away here is to understand the problem you solve for your customers. Speaking their language to express how much better they’ll feel after working with you, will communicate the value of your service. When your customer understands your value, you can charge higher prices.

Ultimately the answer to “what should I be charging for my services” is how much value will your customer receive and how much is it worth to them to be rid of the pain they’re experiencing.

Attaching a number to an emotional problem is not easy because it requires the logical side of our brains to be in tune with the more fluid side. There are quite a few ways to make the process easier, but in the end it’s about testing and re-working your numbers until they feel right.

If you need help with pricing, I’m here for you. Fill out the contact form to book a free, no-obligation call to get all your questions answered. www.kirkcpa.ca/contact

Kaitlin