All too often, it is easy to become so consumed with the day-to-day issues of growing your business that you may fail to allocate enough time to "see the forest through the trees."

To avoid this common problem, be sure to allow adequate time and resources for core knowledge management tasks such as cash flow management, bookkeeping, financial projections, profitability analysis, and strategic business development. These tasks are essential to making sure that your business operation is on track and that problems are not developing that you may be unaware of.

Start-up operations frequently ignore the need for performing these critical activities on a routine basis, or plan to take them on all by themselves, which may not always be the right use of their time and talents. To avoid some of these common pitfalls, consider securing the advice of a respected volunteer business counselor through SCORE, or other public business counseling agency. The IRS website can also be a valuable source of guidance as they offer a small business and self-employed resource center on a variety of tax and non-tax related information.

For additional help with monitoring your business progress, this exercise will address:

• Small Business Record Keeping
• Business Counseling Resources
• Business Monitoring Strategy Worksheet
• Action Items

Now – on to 10a: Small Business Record Keeping

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