How to get started with Money Monday

Step into my office every Monday and you'll find me working on the business money.  I call it Money Money! It's a non-negotiable date with my profit and loss statement and all the numbers that go into running my business and has become a weekly ritual which makes me more money! 

In today's episode, I'm sharing exactly what I do on Money Monday so you can do the same in your business.  I'll show you how a single, dedicated hour once each week can help transform your business's financial health – no more guesswork, just strategic mastery over your money matters. From dissecting business reports to the art of  invoice management, managing expenses and cash flow to chasing up those payments and saving for those inevitable taxes. It's all about the numbers and how to make more profit and I'm here to be your numbers guide. 

So tune in, take notes, and get ready to take control – your business's financial future starts now.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:01

You're listening to the Secrets of Successful Business podcast, your go-to source for business tips, tricks and proven strategies that will help you create a streamlined and profitable business. We chat to the best minds in business about their journey. It's my business and I'll do it my way, how they started, rather than going harder to get more focus on growing more with what you have. What they learned along the way. How long are you going to give this?

Speaker 2 0:29

What compromises are you going to make Just because you can do it?

Speaker 1 0:32

doesn't mean that you should do it. It's really important to remember that it's a long game and, of course, we'll ask them for their secret sauce for creating a successful business. If you're not failing, you're not doing it right. You should be struggling at times. That is part of the journey. Join us as we take a sneak peek behind the curtain. Talk solutions for those business pain points, working smarter, not harder, mindset and the challenges of fitting it all in with the demands of today's busy lifestyle. If you're a business owner, side hustler or just starting your business journey, this podcast is for you. Now here's your host, business coach and content creator, justine McLean from Flossie Creative.

Speaker 2 1:13

Hello and thanks for joining me on the podcast today. In case we haven't met, I'm Justine, a small business owner on a mission to uncover and share the secrets of creating and running a profitable, sustainable and successful business. I've been in business for over 20 years now and I get to use all that I've learned along the way to help other women in business reduce the overwhelm, gain visibility around their numbers, charge what they're worth and make more money. It's about designing a life you love that fits into your definition of success. So if I can help you create the profitable business you deserve, please reach out Now without further ado. Let's dive into today's episode. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the podcast Now.

Speaker 2 2:08

This is a shorty episode. I wanted to put this episode in because one of the questions that I get asked all the time is how can I make a really fast change in terms of my business finances? What's the one thing that I can do that is going to be a game changer in my business and that I can do really simply? And my answer is just as simple, and that is to set aside an hour of your time every single week, whether that's a Money Monday, a Finance Friday or some other alliteration that you can think of. I couldn't think of any for the other days of the week, but it's essentially just picking one hour every single week and that in that hour it's all about the business finance.

Speaker 2 2:50

Why do I say that that's the biggest game changer? Because consistency in business is absolutely critical and for me it's all about creating good habits that are going to change my business and then have that knock-on effect and change my life as a result. And I think if you're someone who never seems to have time to look at the numbers whether that's your mindset or your money block stepping in the fact that you think that you don't do numbers, something like that I think if you just choose to pick a time every week, make it a consistent time and day, and then you choose to dive into the numbers, it's actually going to be a game changer because the more you do it, the more consistent you become at it. It's like any other habit, it just becomes second nature. So in this episode I'm going to share with you exactly what I've done in my business. When I look at my money, which is on a money Monday typically Sometimes it's a finance Friday, but usually the Monday, and hopefully you'll get some inspiration to add this into your business as well.

Speaker 2 4:03

So, as I said, the first step really is just about choosing your hour on the same day every week. Now a lot of people will say to me you know, there's no way I can get all of this done in an hour. And that might be absolutely true. But look, start with an hour, because it seems less overwhelming when you start with just one hour and call it something Money Monday, ceo Hour, finance Friday, whatever you want to call it. Add it to your calendar as a recurring meeting and, the most important part, make it non-negotiable. Now, once you make that decision to do it, to do that hour of money stuff, and that you get that into your diary. It's about showing up every single week, no matter what, turning off all the distractions, sitting in the discomfort of the business money and doing that over and over again. Because, honestly, if you treat that hour with yourself and the money just like you treat an appointment with any other paying client so, in other words, you only cancel in case of emergency it is definitely going to become a game changer in your business Because, as I've said before and I'll say it again, for me, in business as in life, the numbers are going to tell the story. I think we all deserve to be the author of our own story, and what better way to do that than really start to pay attention to your numbers, even if you are not a numbers person. Now, when I share that, you know Money Monday, finance Friday, is the first, most important thing you can do to start making that big change in your business. The next question I always get asked is what are some of the things that I can do in that money hour? And there are lots of them.

Speaker 2 5:53

It's about batching all of the financial tasks that you have in your business, reviewing all those numbers, reviewing your reports like the profit and loss statement. It's about checking cash flow and invoicing, following up people who aren't paying you, who are those late payers, paying bills, setting up direct debits. And while it might sound like a lot, you can definitely achieve it when you batch all of those business tasks together, because once your mind is on any task, like anything, you get in the flow and you tend to just get it done. Sometimes it might take you a few hours rather than just that one hour, but because there's a lot happening in your business, but when you focus on it and you kind of move through it. You'll be surprised at how efficient you become at your money hour every single week. You know 100% that right off the bat, when you start this, it might be really overwhelming. So I always say that the best way around this is to create a little procedure for yourself. You can start with a small set of tasks, you can add to it as you go and then eventually you'll have a comprehensive list of tasks that you either need to complete each week or that are bespoke to your business. So some of them you'll do each week, some of them might be each fortnight, some of them might be monthly, some of them might be quarterly.

Speaker 2 7:16

Now I'm going to run through what my Money Monday looks like in a minute. But if you're thinking, okay, what are some of the tasks that I could be doing during this business hour? I'm just going to run through those quickly now. So during this session, as I said, it's about focusing on the finance only. You can add another one of these sessions for your personal money as well. Really great idea to do that and, like anything, if you get it done in an hour a week and you can kind of then put that to bed, it's not like you have to worry about. Oh gosh, you know, have I got this outstanding bill? Do I need to dive into the bank today to do X or Y or Z? You've done the hour and you're done, you know. Or you've done a bit more than the hour and you're done.

Speaker 2 7:59

So in this session, some of the things that you can do is you can check your business bank accounts, make sure they all look in order and that there's nothing that's popped up, no expense, no kind of strange income that's popped into your account that you don't recognize. You can reconcile your accounts if you use cloud accounting. If you don't use cloud accounting, you really should think about that, because it is an absolute time saver. If you are using spreadsheets instead of cloud accounting, you can update those business spreadsheets. Look at your invoices, prepare any invoices that are due to go out, or update those work in progress invoices for the time that you've spent on a particular job in the previous week. Make sure you send out those invoices, because so many people prepare invoices or they do a draft of an invoice and then they never send it out. As unbelievable as that might sound, it's so true.

Speaker 2 8:55

And then, when it's time to send it out, they feel embarrassed because it's taken so long to send the invoice out and then all of a sudden they find themselves discounting with apologies to the client, and it ends up a complete shambles. So definitely prepare the invoices and send them when they need to go. Look at all the invoices that are outstanding and follow up with those slow payers, those people who have gone over the due date. You have to chase them up, no matter how uncomfortable it is for you. If that's a task that you don't like and you use a bookkeeper, you can always outsource that task. Or, as I've talked about before, create that accounts at email. Create a fictitious accounts person and send the email out from that person. You can pay all of your business expenses and schedule any bills that have arrived during that week. That way you don't have to keep diving back into your bank account to pay bills as they fall due. So if you have time left over in your money hour, you can look at reviewing your expenses. Choose a particular expense. So let's say you choose your phone provider. Do a deep dive into whether or not you can get a better deal on your current service. As I said, if you have some time up your sleeve during your money hour and it might be the third week of every month. You know that it only takes you half an hour to get things done. Use the other half hour to look at your expenses and see where you can save some money. Now the other thing that you can do during your session is to pay wages for yourself, your staff, transfer those superannuation commitments to your super fund. You can look at transferring tax savings rainy day savings to the respective accounts. If you are doing profit first, you could transfer your allocations as well. And the other thing you might like to do is to update your cash flow forecast. If you don't have one, you could create one.

Weekly Finance Management Routine

Speaker 2 10:58

So, again, if you have that time up your sleeve, you don't quite get to the hour. Just think to yourself okay, what else can I do to flesh out this hour that I have, that I've set aside to do the finances? What can I implement in my business to improve? Is it deciding on a new profit number? Is it looking at an offer that you have and really deep diving into that offer to make sure that you are getting bang for your buck every time you deliver it, that you're getting paid what you should be getting paid? You might also like to take one of the hours in each month and review your pricing. So there are lots of different things you can do. You can set money goals. You can choose to spend the hour talking to an expert about money. Just think one hour a week all about money, and the sky is the limit with what you want to put into that hour. But, as I said, it's really about choosing what you want to go into that hour, making a list of all the tasks, of all the possibilities, things that you must do, things that are nice to do, and then essentially creating a procedure for your business so that not only can you follow that every week, but if you bring in additional staff as your business grows, they can also follow that really simply, without too much fuss.

Speaker 2 12:21

So here is what my Money Monday or Finance Friday, depending on what day of the week I'm doing this tends to look like, and it will give you just an example of what happens in my business, because, even though I could definitely outsource this, it's something that I like to keep really close and I choose to do myself. So the first thing I do is I sit down, I open my Xero Cloud Accounting and I reconcile all of my outstanding transactions, then I go and have a look at all of the payments received and I immediately follow up any outstanding payers that I have. I simply send them an email in the first instance, and if there was a time when I had someone who was not paying even after I'd sent out that first email, I just jump on the phone and give them a call, because I find that sometimes emails get lost. Sometimes there are extenuating circumstances, reasons that people don't pay you or can't pay you, and a conversation is all it takes to get it sorted out. The next thing I do is to look at my invoicing, so I create any new invoices that I need to create and I send them out to my clients and then if I am working on a progress job with a particular client so let's say we're doing a deep dive into their accounts then I will send them the next progress payment if that is due at the time. Once I've done all of that, I then jump over into my bank account and I make sure that all looks in order, because once I've reconciled zero, I have a rough idea of what I should have in my accounts, how they should look, and so I go over into the actual bank accounts and make sure that you know they look in order, that the numbers are as they are, reflected in zero, and if they're not for any reason, I'm going to go and take a bit of a deep dive and have a look at what might be going on. The other thing that I do, or the thing that I do next, is I go, because I've got the bank account open in front of me.

Speaker 2 14:24

I pay all of my bills, but I not only do that. I like to set up all of the bills that have arrived through the week, and the reason that I do this is because I just don't want to be diving in and out of my bank account every single week to add or every single day sorry, to add another bill into the system. I sort of like that. You know one touch system, see it once, handle it once and then move on. And so that's why I always like to schedule my bills Now, because I have a cash flow forecast that is set up and I roughly know what to expect and when. It's pretty simple for me to know what's coming and that when I am actually setting up those bills, when I'm scheduling them, that I'm going to have enough money in my account to pay them. So that really is important. There's reasons why you wouldn't schedule your bills, and that is if cashflow is tight, because the last thing you want to do is to be paying fees on bills that are bouncing because there are no funds there.

Speaker 2 15:29

The next job on my list is to check on or make transfers for tax savings and profit, just to ensure there are no hiccups. So I usually go ahead and look at all of the income that I've had in any one week and I transfer 10% of that over to my tax savings account. Because I've gone ahead and I've paid my wages for myself, my staff, I go ahead and I make the wages transfers, but I also transfer across the tax that's due on those wages and in addition to that, I like to transfer my super. So I transfer superannuation every time I run a payroll. My payroll is fortnightly, which means that my super fund and my staff's super fund receive their money every single fortnight. Once I've done all of that, close that business bank account, I go in and I just have a look at my cash flow forecast. So what's happening over the next sort of four weeks to make sure that I've got the funds needed to cover all of the things that I've just put into the bank, to make sure that, if I need to be saving up for a big bill that's coming, that I've got that on track. And also to adjust the cashflow forecast for any invoices, any new business that I've just written or any changes to existing invoices that have gone out.

Speaker 2 16:52

Finally, I open my profit and loss statement because the profit and loss statement that is spat out of Xero is only going to be as good as the reconciliation you've done, the information that you have provided inside of the platform, and so once I know that everything is absolutely up to date, I open that profit and loss statement. I run a report and I ask these three questions Did I get the income that I expected in this particular month or am I on track to get the income that I want this month? Do the expenses all appear in order? Is there an expense that's really standing out because it's particularly high? And it normally isn't. So I do a check there and the final question I ask is my net profit number on target? Now you can go back and listen to my episode all about profit and why you should do that. I've also got an episode on profit first coming up very soon, so keep an eye out for that one.

Speaker 2 17:56

But for me business is about profit. It is definitely the sanity number. It's that money that I make over and above everything else. That gives me that peace of mind that my business is on target and thriving. So I want to make sure that whatever profit number I've set for myself, that I am reaching that and that's it. You know, my money Monday is done. When I've done those things, I'm out. I can move on to the next part of my business. I don't have to worry anymore about money. Have I paid that bill? Has that client paid me? It's done. My money hour for that week is done and I can move on in absolute confidence. That side of the business is sorted.

Speaker 2 18:37

Interestingly, I had a discussion in a group chat with someone this morning where they said that they have just been doing money Monday now for about the last eight weeks and it was something that they had procrastinated about for six months. And the reason that they had been procrastinating is because of the concern that they weren't going to like what they found when they sat down and really took that deep dive or took that look at their money, their business money. So they have essentially been worrying for six whole months about this possibility that seemed to be out there, and so we're reluctant to actually take that next step and have a real look at the numbers. And they said to me this morning that when they actually took that first look at their numbers in the very first Money Monday it was like a dark shield had been lifted away because it just wasn't as bad as what had been building up in their mind over the last six months. And whether it wasn't as bad because it had been six months worth of building up to something that sort of was like waiting for the epic end to a movie that never comes, I'm not sure, but it was wow. This is such a relief because doing this exercise, spending this one hour, made me realize that things just aren't as bad as I thought they were. So sometimes ripping that bandaid off and really getting into the business money particularly if you have mindset issues around money or you're nervous about looking at the money because of what you might find is the best antidote because it might not be as bad as you think it's going to be Now.

Speaker 2 20:22

The other thing to be said about your money Monday or your finance Friday is that it's a great time to touch base with your bookkeeper or another financial professional that you use in your business, just to make sure that everything is on track and looking okay. A number of the tasks that I've mentioned that can be done during Money Monday or during your money hour each week can be outsourced to a bookkeeper. But if they're managing the money for you and you don't have to worry about that day-to-day that nitty-gritty, my recommendation is that you still take that hour and that you either allot your finance professional tasks so, in other words, you know, let's do a deep dive this week into subscriptions. Let's see where we can save money. For example, you check in with them to see how you're going.

Speaker 2 21:13

But if you don't need to do any of that, then I would absolutely say that at a bare minimum, you run your profit and loss statement and you have a look at that to see where your business is at and to see what next steps you might need to take to either grow your business, to boost your cash flow, to claw back some debt that you've got and to take the temperature of how your business is going. Really important because, while it's absolutely okay to outsource the finance side of business, it's never okay to abdicate your financial responsibility. So, in addition to your P&L, if you've got nothing else to do, spend some time and get a bit more educated on the business money, for example, because I think, when you're in that financial headspace, when you're choosing to be the author of your own story, as I always say, the numbers tell a story, so choose to be the author of your own story. As I always say, the numbers tell a story, so choose to be the author of your story. Don't let someone else do it.

Speaker 2 22:13

You're more likely to consider significant strategic decisions in your business that are going to be of a benefit of your business, to your business, but that are all based on the actual numbers, what's actually going on in your business, and that, my friends, is the key to successful business. So that's how you get started with your Money Monday Finance Friday your one hour of money stuff every week. Go ahead, dive in, see how it feels, and I would love to know. Shoot me an email, send me a message on Instagram at Flossie Files. Let me know what's happened, how your business has improved by just adding that dedicated finance hour each week. And until next time, keep living your version of success.

Speaker 1 23:06

Thanks for listening to the Secrets of Successful Business podcast. For more information on all things business, head to flossycomau and make sure you hit subscribe on the show so you don't miss another new episode. If you're enjoying the show, please give it a quick rating or review, share it on your socials or with friends who might enjoy it. Catch you next time.