How often are you checking up on your business's financials? Perhaps you see your accountant once a month, once a quarter, or only once a year. This is not often enough to pick up on big problems in your operations as they arise. But this doesn't mean that you necessarily need to see your accountant more frequently. There are other ways to become more proactive when it comes to your financial health.

One of the great things about today's accounting software is that you don't have to be an accountant to use it. Cloud software like Xero, QuickBooks Online, and Sage, allows you to easily make sense of your financials and keep tabs on your business's health on a daily basis. There are also add-on applications which enable you to see easy to understand reports of real-time financial information. This means that you can approach any problems in terms of profitability or cash flow as they crop up rather than after the fact.

But running your business is time-consuming and you can't be checking every metric every day or even every week. So which metrics should you be focusing on?

Oftentimes, key metrics will be industry-specific. However, in general, there are 5 vital metrics every business owner should track on a regular basis. Read on for our list of suggestions.

In a sales context, a lead refers to contact with a potential customer or "prospect". Leads may also be referred to as the top of the funnel. This means that they are people who are beginning to research a product or service. This is the stage at which you are most at risk of losing prospects as customers if you don't manage to persuade them to move further down the funnel. What every sales team wants is to convert a lead into a paying customer.

It helps to track the number of leads you get on a monthly basis and overtime to get an indication of how many prospective customers or clients are out there. You can assess this by tracking activities such as:

This could give you an indication of future sales numbers. Effective lead tracking enables your sales and marketing teams to work collaboratively so that they can establish what constitutes a high-quality lead and how marketing is impacting sales.

Following leads, the next important metric to consider is sales. How many leads are you converting into a sale and what’s the value of that sale? It helps to track these sales month on month.

Once again, you don't need to track everything manually when it comes to sales as there is software available that can track this for you. For instance, under Syft's Visualize tab, you'll find a sub-tab called Profitability, which includes color-coded and easy to understand graphs for:

The sales graph shows you a comparison between the current month and the prior as well as the proportion of total sales which each bar represents. There are also AI-generated insights underneath which will tell you what your top sales account was for the period, the percentage this account represents and how this compares to the prior period.

I'm sure you've heard the worn out saying, "Cash is King". Well, annoying as it may be to hear, it's true. The reality is, if your company's cash flow is struggling, your business won't last long. If you have more cash flowing out of your business than coming in, you may find it difficult to pay your debts and cover other expenses.

Keeping track of your cash balance is vital. As you start paying expenses, you should be observing how your cash balance is doing. We recommend monitoring this on a weekly basis.

Creditors are entities (be they people or institutions) to whom you owe money, including the taxman. It's a good idea to keep tabs on who you owe money to, and how much, and to keep track of your VAT/GST bill.

If you don't pay off your debts, you can run into a lot of problems down the line. Creditors such as banks can repossess collateral, such as homes and cars, if you fail to make good on your debt. The courts may also order you to pay, garnish wages, or take other actions.

On the other hand, personal creditors may be able to claim unpaid debts as a short-term capital gains loss on their income tax return if they expend a lot of effort on trying to get you to pay them first.

In a nutshell, it's better to ensure that you have the cash available to pay your debts and pay them on time. On Syft, you can consult the Suppliers sub-tab under Visualize to analyze your:

We recommend taking a look at these reports every two weeks or monthly so that you stay on top of your debts and still have the money needed to cover them when it's time to pay up.

The term "debtor days" refers to the number of days that a business takes to collect cash from its credit sales. This is indicative of the business's liquidity position and its collections efficiency.

When it comes to getting your debtors to pay what they owe you, it’s valuable to look into your credit terms. Debtor days has a big impact on cash flow, which is very important to the survival of your business, as mentioned before. If your debtors are taking a long time to pay you, you might need to start phoning customers to see what’s going on.

Keeping track of your business's health is something that you can do on a regular basis, even without your accountant's help. The technology available today doesn't require copious training or in depth accounting knowledge. It’s not so scary. This technology is simplified for ease of use, and it can save you a great deal of time.

We all use cell phones and phone apps. The accounting environment of today is no different from your phone app store. And by keeping track of your own finances on a regular basis, you can respond to operational problems as they arise, rather than finding out about them when the damage has already been done.