Financial Templates - Time Savers

In this day and age time is becoming more and more of a scarce resource. We have managed to speed up or automate many of our daily tasks, and yet we are still often finding that there just aren't enough hours in the day to do what we are capable of getting done.

Business has become more complicated, Fierce, global competition has squeezed our margins so thin that we have to get more and more creative to keep a strong bottom line.

In this situation we need to treat time just as we treat any other precious resource - we have to use it efficiently and employ every means at our disposal to find ways to reduce our need for it to a minimum.

Financial templates for me have always been just about that. If I can save a single key stroke using a financial template for a report I prepare regularly, I will do that. No degree of automaton is too small for me to take advantage of. Those single key strokes add up and over a period of time accumulate into hours. And nothing is more useful than a well-tested and automated financial template when a deadline is looming over your head.

If you ever worked on any financial presentations - be it of financial statements, budgets or business plans - you know the value of a good financial template as a starting point. Even such things as statement titles, column titles and financial statement format take time to set up from scratch.

In my long career in the accounting field, I have used literally hundreds if not thousands of different financial templates. Many of them were already available to me from the work I did at some point in the past. Others had to be designed fresh each time. But I always used whatever I could to not reinvent the wheel and then built on it, if the specific situation required it.

Some financial templates are there to perform a very basic job - to present a straightforward profit and loss statement or a balance sheet. Except for a different legal entity, which requires a different equity section on the balance sheet template, these financial templates are pretty static and can be used over and over again without any major adjustments.

Then there are financial plan templates. Here the amount of customization is usually the greatest. Even though the financial presentation part of any business plan is the most predictable - you will always have to have the basic three financial statements in a standard format - there is still a lot that needs to be adjusted to suit the particular start-up venture you are working on.

When using your own prior work as a financial template, you get another advantage - you are so comfortable with the template that it takes you no time to figure out how to use it. And each time you refine it just a little bit more. So pretty soon your templates run like a Swiss watch! All the problems have been worked out, you have tested it with many different clients and many different business situations and you know you have something you can depend on.

Financial Templates as Tools
For someone who is not a finance professional, financial templates serve a slightly different purpose. They still save time, of course, but they also provide a tool that person would have to pay someone else to develop.

Once this person has a financial template, they can use it to create forms the template will simply guide them through. The mere fact that the financial template has certain line items - like the Balance Sheet, for example, forces you to think in a well-organized fashion and gather the information according to the structure of the template - cash balances, accounts receivable, fixed assets, liabilities, etc.

The same goes for a Business Plan. A well-designed financial template can stop you from making some fundamental mistakes. A client of mine brought me a self-prepared Business Plan once and we both smiled at the many line items he had on his Profit & Loss statement which really belonged on a Balance Sheet. With a professionally designed template, he wouldn't have made that error.

So, use financial templates whenever you can - while working on your budget, profit and loss statement, balance sheet, business plan, time sheet, break even analysis, when looking at several loans etc. Spend the time you will save on what really matters - on critically reviewing and analyzing your financial information rather than tinkering with the tools.

By: Lucy Rudnicka

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Lucy Rudnicka is a former Corporate Controller. She now owns her own Accounting Services firm - FINANCIALS for You - and works primarily with small businesses by providing them with outsourced bookkeeping, business plan preparation and part-time Controller services. Get a professionally designed financial templates here.