I am a counter. I count the number of jumps when I jump rope in the morning (600), the standard number of banana slices on my bowl of cereal (20), the number of fellow parishioners in church with me on Sunday morning (last week, Easter, hit 282), as well as the number of seconds between […]
On the Friday before Christmas, Jenna Olds gave two weeks’ notice of her termination and left for a week’s vacation. My client, the president of a technology-based start-up company, was floored. Jenna was employee number two when she was hired in the fall of 2005, and as the Office Manager and Bookkeeper she was the […]
Many smaller company managers are wary of cost analysis. They have difficulty differentiating between direct and indirect costs, between fixed and variable costs, between period costs and capital costs. This month we consider some basic cost accounting with an expectation of expanding on the subject in occasional future issues. Our experience with smaller companies has proven that strong financial performance is often the result when companies are wedded to cost accounting.
They didn’t teach accrual-based accounting at Harvard. At least not to undergraduates. I had to learn it the hard way. When I was a college junior, I managed a student linen service: two pressed sheets (those were the days before no- iron sheets), 3 fresh towels, and a pillowcase delivered once a week to your […]