Management accounts production

The value of management accounts

The bigger your business grows, the harder it is to discern at-a-glance how you have performed. When you introduce multiple services, offices or functions, looking at a P&L without any analysis is simply not enough. Are you aware what your most profitable product is? How much is your sales team costing you? Is your new office loss-making? If you have questions like this you can’t answer today, it could be a sign you need management accounts.

Management accounts take your P&L and add a whole new layer of analysis to your results. It involves ensuring you are performing a proper ‘close’ of your bookkeeping each month or quarter you are preparing your management accounts, by booking any accruals or provisions to make sure your P&L best reflects reality. Then, it is about complementing your bookkeeping with analytics, such as project markers, or product markers. If done right, you’ll be able to split your P&L and understand a margin for each project, geography or service – whatever is relevant for your business.

A big aspect of management accounts is the output. This can take the form of stock reports in your financial system, or bespoke packs combining financial and non-financial information to give you a detailed snapshot of your business each month.

Our management accounts process

First things first, we will investigate what makes your business what it is and can define what would be the most beneficial for a set of management accounts. It could be that keeping track of your debtors is a top priority or seeing whether a marketing campaign has generated enough sales. A P&L by geography or understanding the travel spend of your team. Unlike statutory accounts, how you wish to define management accounts is completely up to you.

The next process is getting the data. Bookkeeping here becomes incredibly important. We’ll tell you how to make sure you can mark up your records so we can get that information together. We will set up your system so it’s ready for management accounting and give you a guide on how to mark up your records. Of course, if you’d rather we took care of the bookkeeping, then we can handle it for you.

Finally, we will work with you to design a pack focused entirely on your business. A bespoke presentation and analysis as you require, complete with commentary and observations and a scheduled meeting to walk you through it all.

Management accounts also complement budgeting and forecasting well and if you’ve built a budget, then we can fold that into any packs produced. Equally, we can build budgets around what you want to report.