Knowing a full story of how a company's finances are doing is key to the overall strength of the company and to drive better business decisions. This includes reviewing monthly, month over month, year-to-date, year-over-year and ratios.

Setting an annual budget is huge for a growing company. This sets expectations for sales, cost, and profit. Reviewing this can help point out areas where you're over/under spending and can implement changes on spend as needed. Doing a monthly forecast can help set the expectations for the month based on actual trends and new things as they come up that were not known during the budgeting process.

Setting accurate pricing to cover costs at an appropriate margin while being price competitive is critical in running a business at a profit. Accurately knowing gross margin is huge on the capabilities of what your business can do both now and for future growth. Staying on top of any cost increases to be able to market any upcoming price increases can help bring those sales in now.

This could be anywhere from holiday promos, dealer discounts, tiered pricing, one time specials, and more. Giving incentives to choose you over the competitor needs to be done with finances in mind. This will ensure you can offer deals while still being strategic. Review of specials is also crucial to see how they performed and if they could be done again or changed in the future.

There's so much data to go through, having a standard monthly presentation can help point out trends, outliers, and areas to focus business on. Visuals can take the conversation to the next level and keep all levels of an organization on the same page. Key metrics/KPIs can be reviewed at this time as well.

Do your details match your summaries? Does anything seem to be a red flag that needs some deeper looks? Is everything tying out and making sense?