Inputs/outputs in Financial System:

 Inputs:
Information about sales is the obvious input when thinking
about your business’s financial performance, but there are many others too.

The key with this type of information is to automate as much as possible,

because that frees up time and energy for you to focus on things which add
value to, or generate revenue for, your business.

Other critical inputs include:

 Expenses
 Mileage
 You bank feed

Once you have a cloud-based accounting system, using platforms

like ReceiptBank, Expensify and TripCatcher makes plugging that
information in much faster. Many of the apps use machine learning to
automate populating the information you need, so just a quick check of the
results to validate they are correct is all that’s needed.

Gone are the days of turning up at your accountant’s office

with bags of receipts and a spreadsheet. It’s quicker and easier to take a
photograph of each receipt and let an app do what it was designed for, than
to complete a spreadsheet line by line and have your accountant double-
check it.

With inputs, it’s about getting the information accurately and

quickly into the system so it can be used as part of the whole picture. You
may decide expenses are an area to target to help increase your bottom
line, but you need the information into your accounting system first in order
to be able to analyze it.
  Critical Outputs
Having spent time and energy getting your inputs right, you need to analyse
the outputs from your online accounting system.

Here’s where some of the apps and software can also add real value. I
use Futurli (formerly Crunchboards), a system which links to your Xero or
other cloud accounting platform, and produces configurable dashboards of
critical insight into your business. There are other versions
– Fathom and Spotlight being the main two.

This is where the real magic happens for me, because in analysing
your numbers we can look at a wide range of scenarios ahead of when they
might happen, work through all the possible impacts, and leave you better
prepared to make the right decision quickly when the time comes.

It’s like having a regular health check on your business which means
you not only know it better, but you have an understanding of what might
happen in a range of scenarios.