Adam Sand uses a lemonade-stand metaphor to explain basic small-business accounting for a roofing company: record daily sales/jobs in a notebook, reconcile the bank (the jar) with your records, account for interest income, and perform a monthly closeout to ensure accuracy and preparedness. The core message: regular review and accurate records keep any small business (lemonade stand, roofing company, consulting firm) running smoothly and prepared for the future.
Chapters
Running a roofing company is a lot like running a lemonade stand. If you have a lemonade stand, every day you're going to sell lemonade or fix roofs. People are going to pay you money. You keep this money in your big jar, your bank, but every evening you're going to kind of counting the money in your jar to see how much money you made. And you also have this special notebook where you write down every time you sell lemonade or every time you sell a job and how much money you should have in the jar so that the jar should match the book. And sometimes the bank will give you a little extra money for keeping your money there. That's like your interest income. Then you need to make sure the money in your are and the money you wrote down in your book are the same. And if they're not, you need to figure out why and fix it. All of this just comes down to review and accuracy. And that's why you have to do that monthly closeout. You have to be able to look at that big book and make sure that everything makes sense for the end of the month. And by keeping track of these things. Just like if it's a managing a lemonade stand or running a roofing company or a consulting company, doesn't matter. You got to make sure your roofing company is running smoothly and you're prepared for the future and you know exactly how your business is doing.
