How long does it take you to find out what you sold this month?

It is the eleventh. Somebody asks what you have sold this month.

Most owners can give a feeling. Busy, slow, about the same as last month. Very few can give a figure, and the ones who can usually got it by asking two people and adding it up themselves.

The real number arrives around the fifth of next month, after the accountant has closed everything. By then it describes a month you can no longer do anything about.

What late information actually costs

Not accuracy. The figure is correct when it arrives. What it costs is the chance to act.

A slow month seen on the eleventh is a problem you can still fix. You can push the quotations that are pending, call the customers who have gone quiet, chase the order that is sitting with somebody. There are nineteen days left.

The same slow month seen on the fifth of next month is history. Everybody nods, somebody says we must do better, and the next month starts with the same arrangement that produced the first one.

Businesses do not usually lose money because they took the wrong decision. They lose it because the right decision became available too late to take.

What is needed is smaller than a system

You do not need closed books to know your sales position. You need orders confirmed, in one place, as they happen.

That figure will not match the accounts exactly, and it does not need to. It needs to be right enough to tell you whether this month is going well, and available on any day you care to look.

The accountant can keep doing the precise version. Those are two different jobs, and most businesses only have the second one.

Without asking anybody, what have you sold so far this month? If you cannot answer, that is the gap.

Giving an owner a sales figure he can look at on any day, without disturbing the accountant, is usually the first screen we build. Ask us what yours would take.