Categories of Insight are the seven areas into which findings fall after a first 📝Integrated Financial Model (IFM) is built for a company: quality of bookkeeping, quality of accounting, timeliness of bookkeeping, cash management, revenue recognition, the payroll journal entry, and key metrics.
Quality of bookkeeping is judged by consistency; vendors coded to multiple accounts, careless vendor names, and inconsistent payroll, revenue, and COGS entries are common signs of poor bookkeeping. Quality of accounting is the next level: how close the business is to 📝GAAP, evaluated mostly through the balance sheet and the transactions behind its balances, where deferred revenue, prepaid assets, and accrued liabilities usually hold the issues. Timeliness of bookkeeping asks how current the books are, since many bookkeepers keep them only for annual tax filing; the 📝Weekly Philosophy is the alternative.
Cash management insights come from accounts payable and accounts receivable. The revenue recognition assessment reviews how revenue is recognized and identifies challenges and opportunities. The payroll journal entry gets its own review because payroll is usually the largest portion of a business's monthly expense. The key metrics review, when invoicing runs through QuickBooks, covers new customers, repeat customers, and average order value. A related report is the 📝GL Accounting Integrity Report (GLAIR).
Access to additional applications adds insight. 📝Stripe Weekly supports marketing CAC, LTV, and cohort analysis trended over time. Salesforce and HubSpot 📝Weekly Metrics show sales pipeline conversion, salesperson efficiency, and sales CAC. Shopify supplies new and repeat customers, average order value, lifetime revenue, lifetime gross profit, and the LTV to CAC ratio.
A lot of bookkeepers aren't really trained properly. In one venture-backed company we reviewed, no one had touched the books for three months. You only file taxes once a year. You operate your business every day.