Your Monthly Accounts are probably answering the Wrong Question

The enemy of good decision making is information.

Too little of it AND Too much of it.

A business owner I'm working with reminded me of this recently.

His monthly management accounts run to pages. Hundreds of numbers. Every line item accounted for. His finance team work hard to get them out each month and on the surface it looks thorough.

But the reality is they are not actually helping him to steer his business.

The decisions he needed to make - whether to hire now or wait three months, whether to take on a lower-margin business, whether a particular part of the business was carrying its weight - were still all being made on gut feeling.

Not because he didn't care about the numbers. Because the numbers he needed were buried somewhere in the mass of information he was receiving each month.

In his words: "It doesn't inform my judgement and it's delaying my decision making."

Waiting to decide has a real cost.

So we made a new rule as we redesigned what he receives each month with this Finance Team.

If it doesn't help him make a decision, it doesn't go on the page!

That sounds simple. It's actually quite a discipline to apply. There's a natural tendency, especially in finance teams , to report everything, because leaving something out feels like a risk. But reporting everything is its own risk. It creates noise that drowns out any insights that the business needs to act on.

What he needs each month comes down to four or five numbers. Not hundreds. And those numbers need to answer three questions clearly:

What's changed since last month?

What's off track against where we expected to be?

What needs a decision or action right now?

Everything else can sit behind the summary for anyone who needs to go deeper.

The monthly accounts most businesses I see receive are designed for compliance. For VAT returns, a quick check of net profit and year-end filing. That's what they're built for.

Running a business is a different job. It needs different information, presented differently, at the right time.