Financial Confidence Starts with Trusting Your Numbers
I recently started working with a business owner who had been doing their own bookkeeping.
They weren’t doing a terrible job.
There wasn’t a huge mess to sort out.
They had simply reached the point where they weren’t completely confident that what they were doing was right.
Had everything been entered correctly?
Was there anything they had missed?
Was there something they should be doing that they didn’t know about?
What they really wanted was reassurance.
And it got me thinking about financial confidence, because I don’t think it necessarily comes from knowing more about finance.
Sometimes it comes from knowing you don’t have to know everything yourself.
There’s a cost to constantly second-guessing yourself
When you’re running a business, you make decisions all day long.
Most business owners aren’t interested in becoming experts in bookkeeping or accounting. But when you’re responsible for it yourself, there’s always the possibility that you’ve got something wrong.
So you check.
You Google.
You go back over something you’ve already done.
Or you put it to one side because you’re not quite sure what to do with it.
None of that sounds particularly significant.
But it takes time, and perhaps more importantly, it takes headspace.
For this particular business owner, having someone check what they were doing and reassure them that things were being dealt with properly meant they could stop worrying about it.
They saved time.
They saved stress.
And they could get on with running their business.
You don’t have to be bad at something to hand it over
I think this is an important distinction.
There can be a tendency to think you outsource something when you can’t do it anymore.
But being capable of doing something and being the right person to continue doing it are two different things.
As a business grows, there are more demands on the owner’s time. At some point, doing the bookkeeping yourself – even if you’re perfectly capable of it – may simply stop being the best use of your time.
But I think there’s another step beyond that.
Because financial confidence isn’t just about knowing the bookkeeping has been done correctly.
That’s where it starts.
Trusting the numbers changes the conversation
If you don’t completely trust the numbers in front of you, it’s very difficult to use them to make decisions.
You’re still wondering whether they’re right.
Whether something is missing.
Whether the bank balance is really telling you what you think it is.
Once that uncertainty disappears, the conversation can move on.
Instead of asking:
“Have I done this right?”
you can start asking:
“What are these numbers telling me?”
“Can we afford to do this?”
“What happens to cash if we take someone else on?”
“Does this fit with everything else we’re planning?”
That’s a very different relationship with finance.
The numbers stop being something that needs to be dealt with and start becoming something you can actually use.
Financial confidence doesn’t mean knowing all the answers
I work with numbers every day, but I don’t think business owners need to.
They need to know that the information they’re looking at is reliable.
They need to understand what matters.
They need someone to flag the things they might not have spotted themselves.
And they need to know what happens next.
That might begin with something as simple as wanting reassurance that the bookkeeping is right.
But once you trust the numbers, you can stop spending your time wondering whether you’ve missed something and start using that information to look ahead.
You can ask better questions.
You can make decisions with more confidence.
And finance becomes less about looking back, and more about helping you decide what comes next.
I’m Sarah Hands, founder of SJ Accountancy. I work with growing businesses that want more than reports and year-end numbers. I help business owners understand their finances, plan ahead and make confident decisions about what comes next.
If you’d value having a finance person in the conversation earlier, let’s have a chat.