I built a self-maintaining knowledge base for work. Meeting notes, brain dumps, initiatives, and issues compile automatically. Notes link to people, partners, employees, vendors, and clients. Notes also link to initiatives and issues. A dashboard shows emergent patterns and problems across all of it. My job is to feed it, make the occasional correction, and ask it questions. Every query gets added back as a note. So if I ask about something today and take action on it next week, the system connects those dots. It knows what I asked. It knows what I did. ...

“One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do / Two can be as bad as one / It’s the loneliest number since the number one” — “One” by Three Dog Night Too often, you limit yourself to too small a set of outcomes. The worse is that you can only imagine one. Mostly you think of two because you tend to think in binary terms: A or B, yes or no, this or that. ...

Only a handful of financial metrics are needed to understand a company’s health. You can certainly get fancy and go crazy with ratios, charts, and dashboards, but keeping it simple will get you 80% to understand your company. Cash balance Knowing the cash balance daily helps you understand if you have enough to fund operations. It’s a good indicator of whether you must ramp up cash collections or slow down cash expenditures. ...

Here’s why I (naively) thought I had the perfect background to run a business: I spoke the “language of business” - I even have an accounting degree. I’m a certified accounting expert - I have my CPA license. I’m a financial reporting expert - I worked in public accounting as a financial statement auditor. My clients reported their financial statements to the Securities and Exchange Commission. My job was to check the financial statements and say they were good. When I started Basis 365 Accounting, I thought these would help me master my business. These things helped, but I realized they’re only a small part of running a business. ...

I’ve operated an accounting firm for over a decade, and during that time, business owners have come to us with the same story: “My bookkeeper just quit, and I have two weeks to find a new bookkeeper.” What’s even worse is that there has to be a knowledge transfer between the bookkeepers within those two weeks! When hiring a bookkeeper, ask these 3 interview questions to minimize the risk of this happening to you. ...