Chapter 20
What should I actually be looking at, and how often?
Not everything needs checking every day, and a few things need checking every single day without exception. Confusing the two is how a shop misses a problem that was visible for a month.
Every report in this guide answers one question well. What none of them tells you on its own is when to open it. That is a habit, not a report, and it is worth writing down once so you stop deciding it from scratch every morning.
Every day, before you open the till
Count the drawer and close last night's shift. This is the one check that has no substitute and no good reason to skip: money that goes missing is easiest to explain the same day, while somebody still remembers the sale, and hardest to explain a month later when three shifts have passed through the same register.
Glance at what is about to run out. Not a full stock count — just the short list the software already keeps of what has fallen under its reorder point. A minute here saves a customer walking out because a size was not reordered in time.
Every week, sitting down for ten minutes
Look at who has not paid you, and for how long. A customer thirty days late is a phone call. A customer ninety days late is a decision about whether you still extend them credit. The gap between those two is exactly why this is a weekly habit and not a monthly surprise.
Look at which stock has not moved. Not to panic about it — some of it is simply out of season — but to notice before a shelf full of money quietly turns into a shelf nobody wants.
Every month, when you close it
Read the profit and loss for the month, and compare it with what is actually in the bank. If they disagree by a lot, that disagreement has a cause — money owed to you, money tied up in stock, or simply timing — and it is far easier to trace one month back than four.
Close the month once you have looked. Closing is not a formality; it is what makes next month's numbers trustworthy on their own, without carrying last month's unfinished business into them.
Once a year, and this one is not optional
Close the fiscal year. A year that is never closed leaves the year after it reading the wrong numbers, quietly, with nothing on the screen to say so. This is covered on its own, because it is the one habit that is easy to postpone and expensive to have postponed.