The Small Business Survival Guide: How to Manage Your Cash, Profits & Taxes (Small Business Sourcebooks)
from the IntroductionA primary focus of this book is to enhance your fiscal responsibility. Because small business owners lose billions of dollars each year, they are one of my primary targets. Most of them first decide to open a business and then discover the need to learn how to run it. These risk takers eagerly tie their health, wealth and well-being to a decision to make it on their own, ready or not! It is generally believed that if they wait until they are fully educated, fully financed and otherwise fully prepared, the opportunity will bypass them.This book provides you with the opportunity to catch up fast. Many new concepts--The Real Ratio and the Cycle of Demise, for example--have been developed in Part I of the book to deal with fiscal ignorance in a way that does not require a college education. These new concepts, together with No-Entry Accounting, provide a breakthrough in small business education. This package has been described as, "The meat and potatoes of what it takes to run a business."The simple basics that No-Entry Accounting provides in Part II are a necessary foundation for learning business concepts beyond accounting mechanics. The artifacts of conventional accounting, debits and credits, ledgers and journals, are abandoned. In their place is left a small business information system that is exceptionally easy to use, is perpetually audit ready and is faster than doing the work on a computer.The greatest problem facing the small business owner is simple ignorance. There is nothing particularly difficult about learning to be fiscally responsible. The problem is that there are many small, simple principles which are an absolute necessity to running a fiscally sound entity. An ignorance regarding these simple principles leads directly to failure. While the principles are simple, they are not easy to come by, as they are tidbits derived from many academic disciplines. Parts III and IV of this book tie together these pieces to help you master cash management and achieve profitability.