Mike AndesFounder, Augusta Lawn Care and Homeworks · Founder of Homeworks and Augusta Lawn Care

Checking Your Bank Account Every Day Is Making You Worse at Business

26 Jul 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

1:11

In this YouTube monologue, Mike Andes explains how constantly monitoring daily bank balances and transaction flows can hinder decision‑making as a business grows. He describes "bank‑balance accounting"—the practice of using the current cash balance to decide on hiring, equipment purchases, and other operational moves—as essential for very small businesses (under roughly $1 million in annual revenue). However, once a company scales, the flood of daily payouts, Stripe transactions, and other high‑frequency financial data becomes distracting noise that obscures the few key inputs that truly affect strategic choices. Andes argues that entrepreneurs should identify and focus only on the metrics that directly influence the decisions they need to make, removing irrelevant financial visibility to achieve clearer, more effective outcomes.

Chapters

I don't look at every bank account every single day. And when I first got started, it was helpful. It pushed me, it allowed me to be able to operate based upon how much cash was in the bank. Because if you have $20,000 versus $20 in the bank account and you're just getting started, it is absolutely going to change your behavior for that day. It is absolutely gonna change whether or not you buy another piece of equipment, whether you hire someone. As the business grows, understanding that what inputs aren't actually going to change decision-making today allows you to get clear with what inputs you actually need to remove from your visibility so that you can get clear outputs. I don't look at like Stripe payouts, daily transactions. There are thousands of them every single day, probably tens of thousands across the franchise, across the software, across the media. Every single day, hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars going in and out. My attention on that keeps me distracted from making good decisions. Again, to be clear, if you're doing under $1 million in annual revenue, it's likely that you're doing what I call bank balance accounting or bank balance decision-making, which is I look at bank balance and based upon that is whether or not I will hire someone whether or not I will buy another piece of equipment. And that is required when you're smaller. As you begin to grow, constant attention on things other than the inputs required to make the decisions you need to make is just noise.