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Caroline: Welcome to the first episode of Track This, expert business
tracking tips from CEOs brought to you by Palo Alto Software and
T Sheets. Please Tweet us your business tracking comments and
questions using the #trackthis. Our experts are Sabrina Parsons,
CEO Palo Alto Software, makers of the number one cloud based app
for small business pitching, planning, and financial tracking,
and Matt Rissel, CEO of T Sheets, maker of the number one cloud
based app for employee time tracking, and reporting. Welcome
Sabrina and Matt to the show.
Matt: Well, thanks, Caroline. I appreciate it. I have no idea where you got
that picture of me because I have hair, and I'm a little bit on
the bald side so it might be a few years old. But nonetheless,
thanks for using a young, vibrant picture of me.
Caroline: Yeah, you're looking good, Matt. Sabrina, you're up first, and
I see that you have a financial tracking tip for us today. So
what is your small business financial tracking tip for our
listeners today?
Sabrina: You know, I think this is my number one tracking tip for anyone
running a business, but definitely on the small business side I
think we tend to get overwhelmed. There's so much going on.
We're constantly working in the business. It's hard to kind of
stand back and look at what's actually going on in the big
picture and to work on the business. When you're tracking your
financials, you want to really look at what's going on with your
business in the context of different time periods. You can see
on the slide it's got a little screen shot here of tracking a
small business's profit for last month. You can also see
underneath it shows business plan verses previous month and
verses last year. This is exactly how I manage Palo Alto
Software and make sure we keep our financials on track and we're
fiscally very healthy. I look at a profit or revenue or expenses
and I compare that to what I thought we were going to do to my
plan. But then I always want to look at it in the context of the
previous period. This one would be the previous month. Did I
beat last month? Because I always want to beat last month, but
every business does have some seasonality. I can't just look at
it last month. I have to also look at what I did the same month
last year.
In our business, for instance, if I'm looking at January verses
December, December is not a month where a lot of people are
doing a lot of financial tracking and financial management in
their small business. They're off having fun and going to family
holidays and spending lots of money. December is always a month
where we bring in less revenue than in January, so I can't just
look at January compared to December. I've got to look at
January compared to the previous January. But I do want to make
sure that January is more than December, so always look at your
actual financials against your plan, your previous period, and
the same period in the previous year. It's going to give you a
really sense of where you are, where you're going, and did you
actually do what you said you were going to do when compared to
your plan.
Matt: Sabrina, I think you are exactly right. Unless the numbers have
context going backwards, you have no idea really how you're
doing. Having a history and doing the year-over-year month-over-
month comparisons are essential. It's so interesting to me how
few business leaders really do, do that. They'll look at numbers
in isolated incidences, and then they make decisions based on
false precepts. So, great.
Sabrina: That's exactly right. I mean Matt's got it right on. It's all
about making better decisions, right? I mean all of us running
businesses every day we're juggling all these different
decisions we have to make, and it's hard to make the decisions.
Sometimes you kind of get a little bit of a stomach ache if like
"Wow, is that the right decision?" So anywhere you can get some
data and look at some numbers to help you out, why not?
Matt: And Sabrina, when it comes to financials, I do not like stomach
aches.
Caroline: Thank you, guys, for that tip. Matt, I see that you have a time
tracking tip for our small business listeners. Tell us about it.
Matt: I do, and on this slide you can see "Pick a time tracking system that
90% of your employees will love." One of the biggest problems
that we see, and it may not seem like a big issue when you first
look at it, but one of the first tools that a company that's
growing will figure out is that they need a time tracking
system. Whether it be because an employee fudged on a time card
or because a company wants to start allocating time against
projects so they need to track employees' time in the field,
whatever the case may be, it's usually one of the first tools
that a company growth says, "Yep, we need an employee time
tracking system." But what happens is they start looking for one
and then they start lumping in ideas like we should get an
inventory tracking system, too, or we should get a big HR system
or ERP system. That really is overkill for what they want. But
they are thinking maybe I can solve more and more problems at
one time.
What happens is they end up getting a system that has a time
tracking system as an after thought. Then they have a software
program that never solved the problem that they originally set
out to solve, which is a very simple, but important, time
tracking system. Time tracking is one of the only tools that is
used multiple times daily by every single employee in the
company. It is so important to get a system that's mobile, that
can grow with your company, and one that your employees will
actually use.
Sabrina: And Matt, I think not only are you right, but Palo Alto
Software went through exactly the same thing. You get your
business started. You have different kinds of employees. You're
not really thinking about things, and all of a sudden we
realized we're tracking time sheets for hourly employees in
Excel, and that is a nightmare. Had we done what you suggest, we
would have been in a much better place. I hadn't really thought
about it ahead of time, rather than oh my god, now we have a
problem. Now we have to go fix the problem, and then we're under
the gun to fix the problem. The first time around, we definitely
did not feel like I did the research and really picked a system
that worked well for us. Hence, we had to [??], and T Sheets is
definitely a software that I wish I had known about three years
ago when I was looking at everything and absolutely give all the
flexibility that you really need when looking at time tracking.
But definitely, don't do the mistake I did. Think about it ahead
of time and really look at what you need and get it in place and
get something your employees love to use.
Matt: Well thank you for saying that. Something I often say is if you need
to hammer and nail, you're not going to go grab your curling
iron, right? Fix the problem with the right tool.
Sabrina: Exactly, exactly.
Caroline: Great. Thank you, Matt and Sabrina, for sharing your tracking
expertise with us.
So everyone, please be sure to visit bplans.com/trackthis for additional
tips and to join in on the first ever Small Business Tracking
Week which runs from October 20-26. Palo Alto Software and T
Sheets are co-hosting Small Business Tracking Week and sharing
fun and educational campaigns to help you better track your
business. And, follow the hashtag TrackThis to share your small
business tracking tips and questions with us. I also want to
point out that you can Tweet Sabrina and Matt directly,
Sabrina@MommyCEO and Matt@MattRissell. Thank you again, Matt and
Sabrina. Happy tracking.