Are you happy with your business this year? What are you going to do differently? How can you hire the right people to support your vision? Sadly, many small business owners do not spend enough time planning for the future. It’s quite understandable. Managers must keep pace with the daily demands of their businesses, including payroll, taxes, product/service delivery, and customer expectations.Fortunately, the end of the year is the perfect time for a comprehensive evaluation of your company. Your business needs a checkup. Most people can relate to a checkup with their local doctor, depending on their background and personality characteristics (age, sex, family medical history). The doctor will conduct a variety of tests, including blood, vision, heart, and hearing.In fact, one element like an individual’s weight is not the only indicator of overall good health. Likewise, small businesses could benefit from a good checkup too. Successful entrepreneurs think strategically when engaged in a hostile, global environment.After 27 years of managing projects and conducting over 100 organizational evaluations of business organizations, I realize that both large and small organizations struggle in implementing their operations effectively. This article examines how small businesses need to conduct an effective checkup of their organizations.Welcome to the New Normal! Yet, nearly a year after this pandemic, the full impact on the U.S. economy is unclear. According to recent studies, more than four million Americans have left the workforce, and nearly 10 million are now unemployed compared with last February.In fact, the number of unemployed people continues to rise. According to a business study conducted between March 28 and April 4, 2020, small businesses have been heavily damaged by the lockdowns due to Covid-19.In an analysis of more than 5,800 small businesses (reaching a network of 4.6 million small businesses), the research highlighted the damage caused by the pandemic. The results showed evident damage of the pandemic. At this juncture, 43% of businesses had temporarily closed, and nearly all of these closures were due to COVID-19.Respondents stated that they had temporarily closed, largely pointed to reductions in demand and employee health concerns as the reasons for closure. In fact, the businesses, on average, reported having reduced their active employment by 39% since January.All industries have been impacted. However, retail, arts and entertainment, personal services, food services, and hospitality businesses showed significant employment declines exceeding 50%. Some businesses hope for assistance from the government.According to a Babson’s Goldman Sachs report, 88% of U.S. small business owners have already exhausted their Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan; the Small Business Association gave these loans specifically to help businesses keep their workforce employed during the pandemic. These loans were helpful.Yet, these successes do not diminish the fact that more than 32% of PPP loan recipients already have laid off employees or cut wages. In fact, Forty-three percent of Black small business owners reported that their businesses’ cash reserves would be depleted by year’s end due to Covid-19.Today’s small businesses and entrepreneurs must retool themselves, given the potential impacts of Covid-19 have the necessary capacity to change their way of thinking because of their passion. However, small businesses must be willing to evaluate their current operations and make the required changes.For example, customers have largely gone online to purchase services due to the lockdowns. If a business does not have an online presence now, this company does not exist. Internet pioneer and CEO of PSINet Bill Schrader explains the significant of online visibility: “Almost overnight, the Internet’s gone from a technical wonder to a business must.”With the appropriate diagnosis of an organization, a business can develop more sustainable success. Thus, the right checkup is critical.Below are some critical questions to help you conduct your own self-checkup:

Do you have a clear vision for your business? What is it?

Do you know why your customers buy from you and why others do not buy from you?

What results are you getting from your marketing? Do you have an effective online presence on the web?

Are you collecting data or the right kind of data on your customers and competitors?

Are you keeping pace with your industry trends? If so, what are the key trends?

How are you measuring results (i.e., key performance indicators like cash flow and revenue)?

What are your key competitors’ marketing strategies?

Have you evaluated your strengths and weaknesses (i.e., SWOT Analysis)?

In summary, successful global businesses, like IBM and Google, have continuous systems in place to evaluate their performance. Let’s call this process an organizational checkup.Small businesses that want to succeed in this global and technological climate must be able to conduct this self-evaluation or checkup. This article demonstrated the relevancy of a good checkup to help improve a business by asking probing questions. In many cases, small businesses do not have to take on this organizational checkup along.There are various organizations like the Small Business Administration and local universities that can assist in this process. Have you conducted a checkup for your business this year? It’s not too late. Start the new year with a healthy business checkup.© 2021 by D. D. Green

Restaurant owners work hard every day to see to it that their business stays in good shape. Working late hours to analyze the numbers gathered during the day, crunching down tons of numbers just to see if they have gained or lost money. Most of owners of a restaurant are also its managers too. This adds more responsibility and workload for them. They will be performing tons of paperwork in terms of accounting and other money related tasks. Some may even need to hire a secretary to help them out and this will cost them more money.A good option for solving this somewhat of a financial crisis that is brought to the restaurant is through the utilization of restaurant accounting software. There are quite a lot of features that are being used by many restaurant owners but most of them have just about the same goal and that is to optimize income.This software allows restaurant managers to not need to always be in the restaurant to see if things are going well. The system creates various documents and makes them into one single database to report what has happened throughout the day. This allows managers and owners to create ways to improve more on various aspects in the restaurant. For example they can look into dishes that aren’t currently turning a profit and figure out how to fix it.One great thing about this system is that owners need not crunch various numbers and applications just to give the employees their payroll. Just connect the system to a timekeeping device that the employees are using and the system will automatically solve the amount of pay they will receive. You will need to program the system beforehand on how much you will be paying them per hour of work or per day. This useful feature saves the manager a lot of time when compared to solving for the payroll manually.Inventory monitoring is one of the many hard things to do in a restaurant due to the many ingredients restaurants use. Inventory control is done through a monitoring system that is imbedded in the accounting software mainly in the point of sales module. When a certain dish is ordered, the employee can just put it in the point of sales hardware and the amount of ingredients to be used is then deducted from the inventory list. When the inventory reaches a certain level, it may be programmed to automatically alert employees or the manager to order some more additional items in order to keep the inventory stocked. This feature allows the prevention of running out of stock during work hours. This will also keep customers happy with what they want to eat in your fine restaurant.Getting your restaurant up and running can be made easier with having a restaurant accounting software package. It is kind of like having an all-around virtual secretary in your very own restaurant. Stay in business by getting one of these systems.