"I have a bookkeeper and a CPA. I'm covered." That's what Nora told me the first time we spoke.

I hear that all the time from women business owners, and I always say the same thing back. If you're at multi six and seven figures, you're not.

Her eyebrows raised.

Nora ran a multi six figure coaching business. She was a creative, a natural at marketing and connecting with her audience, and getting into the weeds with numbers was the last thing she wanted to spend her time on. She had a bookkeeper, her ops person, who genuinely loved the work and cared about getting it right. But she had no formal financial background, and she did the books when she had time, which meant Nora's financial information was often running three to four months behind. On top of that, nothing was categorized with much detail, expenses were lumped together broadly rather than broken out in a way that could actually tell you anything useful.

Here's the part that made this so hard to see for so long. Nora was financially phobic herself, she never really liked looking at her numbers, and her bookkeeper knew it. So neither of them ever pushed for anything more detailed or more current, because why would you build something nobody wants to look at anyway. But underneath that avoidance was something Nora did know, even if she never said it out loud. Money was a real struggle. Her ops person often lost sleep wondering how bills and payroll were actually going to get covered that month, and so did Nora. Neither of them knew how much information was sitting right there waiting to be seen, how much money could be stopped from quietly leaking out of the business, or how many decisions could be made from a place of real knowledge instead of holding your breath every month.

Once we got her financials caught up, I had her bookkeeper split out every software subscription and membership into its own line item, categorized clearly and specifically. I knew Nora didn't want to dig through the numbers herself, so I wanted the picture to be immediately obvious the moment she looked at it, one glance, and she could see exactly what the business was paying for every month.

What that revealed was something more understandable than it might sound. Her bookkeeper didn't know which software tools the team was actually using day to day. Nora didn't know which subscriptions were still being paid for. Nobody was doing anything wrong, they simply weren't looking closely enough, together, for long enough, to notice the gap.

Once it was all laid out clearly, side by side, we could finally see it. Subscriptions nobody had touched in months came off the books immediately. In the first three months of working together, that single shift increased her profit by $20,000.

But the bigger shift was quieter than that. The sleepless nights, the quiet dread around whether bills and payroll would be covered, that stopped once we started working together inside my partnership. Nora and her ops person weren't just looking at cleaner numbers, they were finally sleeping through the night.

This is exactly why timeliness and detail matter as much as accuracy. A bookkeeper can be wonderful at their job and still leave real money on the table if the numbers aren't current or specific enough to actually mean something. That's part of what a CFO brings to a business like Nora's, not just finding what's wrong, but making sure the person keeping your books stays accountable to a level of detail and a timeline that actually lets you catch things while they're still small, and helping a financially phobic business owner see that her numbers aren't something to fear, they're the very thing that can empower every decision she makes, and even help her sleep at night.

This is why I now hold a free event every month. To show you what your financials should look like so you can make the best decisions. To ask questions, there are no dumb ones, and to help you become empowered around your financial information and get to the other side of your financial phobia.

Because here's what I know for certain. The answers are always there, waiting in the financial information, whenever you're ready to look. If you're afraid you're missing something in your business, or you know it's finally time to start understanding your financial information, or like Nora, losing sleep over your ability to pay your team and other bills, come join me at my next Where Is All My Money Going. https://www.audreyfaustconsulting.com/money.