Data Resolution III: Draw the Line and Maintain It.

By design, Kaladi Coffee is a management-decentralized operation. Most of the decisions that happen on a daily basis at our joint are made by our baristas, the title granted to every fully-trained employee of the company.  Employees are responsible for ordering all supplies, writing the schedule, determining roasting volume, maintaining and controlling inventory, and other key management functions. Ownership has ultimate responsibility; when something goes seriously wrong, it’s our job to remedy the situation (that sounds pretty sexy, but it's usually just a busted toilet, you know?),  but a broad based pyramid of command means that there is a narrow variety of tasks that occur regularly at the top. 

I'm real good with a plunger.

One of the correlating beauties of that design is that while my data needs to be accurate, I don’t need all that much of it.  But it needs to be entered.  Every day.  Like religion, but a lot more serious.

On the retail side of things, the only sales numbers we track are beverage sales, bean sales, food sales, and a catch-all category we call “retail sales”.  Four little numbers per day give me all of the data I need.  We track wholesale operations and internet sales separately, but in similarly streamlined format.  Sales numbers are most often analyzed from within QuickBooks, but bar sales are exported into a spreadsheet as well.  That step allows me to write algorithms for charting, for instance, sales along various-length moving averages.  Data logging takes approximately ten minutes per day, every day of the week.  In exchange for that effort, I get an accurate picture of how each critical segment of my business is trending, can compare that information against historical data, and my daily banking is completed as an extra benefit.

Expenses need to be broken out and tracked in greater detail, as expense information is not only used to help steer purchasing decisions and analyze business segment profitability, but also forms the basis for various deductions on the company’s tax return.  Constructing a chart of accounts, if you’ve never done it before, is something best done with an hour or two of help from your accountant.  Expense accounts should correlate to income accounts, facilitating expense analysis.  Expenses should be nested in an intelligent way, such that related categories of expense build large, meaningful chunks of data.

And the rest is simple.  Laying out the architecture of your bookkeeping system is thought-provoking; data entry isn’t.  But do it.  Do it every day.  Don’t put it off ‘til the end of each month.  Every day of the week, you should log the prior day’s sales, and use those results to build your bank deposit.  Yes, even if it’s only forty bucks.  Your diligence will reward you.