Edit Company Settings

Follow this video to understand and utilize the Edit Company Settings area, and make changes to how companies behave and how reports are displayed:

The Edit Company Settings page lets you control how CFO Scoreboard behaves when analyzing a company. Let’s take a look at what each setting does.

At the top of the page, you can set the company name and industry.

If your company operates on a fiscal year that is different from the calendar year, specify the month in which your fiscal year begins, and CFO Scoreboard will adjust its reports to align to your fiscal year.

You can also change the currency symbol you would like to see in the reports. If your currency symbol is not listed, select None.

The “Show Owner's Expense” setting specifies how owner's expenses should be treated in CFO Scoreboard. Owner's expenses are expenses incurred by the business on behalf of the owner. This includes the owner's salary and any "Ya-Ya" expenses: company cars, personal travel, pool repair, kids on the payroll and the like.

I recommend showing Owner's Expenses “Below the Line”, which means that CFO Scoreboard will remove Owner's Expenses when it calculates your business’ profits. This will give you a much more accurate picture of how your business is really performing. When you view your income statement in Trends, CFO Scoreboard moves these Owner's expenses "below the line", or below the profit line, so that you can see the profit the business generated before owner's expenses as well as the profit after owner's expenses are taken into consideration.

Of course, this CFO Scoreboard income statement will not match the income statement your accountant gives you, because your accountant is not factoring out owner's expenses. To see your income statement the way that your accountant gives it to you, change the Show Owner's Expense to "Above the Line", and CFO Scoreboard will treat these expenses as typical business expenses. I will warn you, however, that this will dramatically reduce your optics on your business.

The Send Alerts setting tells CFO Scoreboard whether or not you would like to receive email alerts when we detect a problem in your business. If this company is an active, functioning company, I recommend keeping alerts turned on. You can either have alerts sent to only yourself, or to yourself and any other users with whom you have shared the company.

CFO Scoreboard's report has a powerful feature we call Money Left on the Table. This section of the report will compare your business' current performance to the best performance you've ever achieved and show you how much incremental cash you could have generated if your business was operating at its peak level of performance.

Over time, your business may fundamentally change the way it operates, making the comparison to all previous time periods less useful. Perhaps you have changed your business model, entered an entirely new market, or started selling a new product. Comparing your current business to that old business is like comparing apples to oranges. If this is the case in your business, you can adjust the Best Ever Starting Date. You can set this date to the month when your business changed. When determining your best ever performance, CFO Scoreboard will not consider any financial information prior to that date.

If your business model has been fairly consistent, I recommend keeping the default setting, which will look back three years when calculating the business’ “best ever” performance.

Some business owners have an accountant, bookkeeper, or business partner who manages the day-to-day accounting functions of the business. Ideally, this person would be the one to upload the business’ financial statements into CFO Scoreboard each month.

To enable this, you may share your company with your bookkeeper as long as he or she is already a user of CFO Scoreboard. It's important to know that when you share a company with someone, they have full access to all of your business’ accounting reports. In addition, they will have the ability to upload financial statements and create new What If scenarios.