preview

Financial Statements Leading You Down A Disastrous Path

Better Essays

Are Your Financial Statements Leading You Down a Disastrous Path (And You Don 't Even Realize It)? If 75% of the value of your business in NOT reflected on your financial statements, how valid is the analysis that the accountant gave you?

After 30 years of being a CPA and preparing, reviewing, auditing, evaluating, analyzing and comparing financial statements, the sad truth is this:

TRADITIONAL FINANCIAL STATEMENTS CAN OFTEN MISLEAD YOU AND THEY CAN TAKE YOU DOWN A DISASTROUS PATH.

The problem is that business owners often don 't realize the limitations. Even fewer of them know how to overcome the shortcomings of traditional financial statements. Below are the summarized and simplified financial information for two companies.

Revenue …show more content…

So how valid is the business analysis that the accountant gave you about how you are going?

"More than 75% of the average firm 's market value is derived from intangible assets that traditional financial metrics don 't capture... firms can 't manage what they can 't measure." --Strategy Maps by Kaplan and Norton
So you can forget about what is on your balance sheet for now. The real value of your business is not reflected there. The most important asset your company possesses is its Customer Asset.

Customer Asset (CA) =Total lifetime value of all of your current customers.

If you were to sell your company, the buyer would perform an analysis of the true value of your business. This would be a detailed analysis of the CA. Isn 't it logical that you should have the same value focus as would a potential buyer? You need to know where the value is in your business. Once you have that knowledge, you can use it to improve the value of your business.

I see so many business owners who sell their business at X value, and if they had made a few strategic improvements to increase their CA, they could have received a 2 to 4+ times higher value for their business than they did receive.

There are hundreds of factors that can increase your CA. Many times they boil down to a few key factors. Even a small deterioration in a few important factors, when left unnoticed and unchecked, can accumulate into devastating

Get Access