Mid-Year Check-In: Do This To Refocus On Your Business
The first half of the year is in the books—how did you do financially?
If the past six months felt like a blur of busyness, now’s the time to pause, reflect, and possibly reset.
Pause by setting aside time when you will look back at the first half of the year and review your numbers.
Schedule an hour or two on your calendar, decide how you’ll reward yourself when you actually follow through, and when the time comes, silence notifications on your phone and dive in.
Pro Tip: If you’re behind on bookkeeping, whether you do it yourself or hire someone else, make it a priority to get caught up through June 30 before you sit down to reflect.
Why? To avoid what we don’t want to happen:
You carve out the review time and sit down ready to focus. (WIN!)
You open QuickBooks to find transactions haven’t been categorized since February and there’s a long list to go through. (Ugh.)
You start on the top line, struggling to place a $79.43 charge with a description you don’t recognize…
Pull up your calendar to see what you were doing on that date, but that doesn’t ring a bell…
Log in to your credit card account to view the expanded description, which still doesn’t help…
And look up to find 30 minutes of your precious time has been squandered, with no resolution. (Double ugh.)
If you’re a bookkeeping DIY-er, set aside just 30 minutes per day for reviews until you get caught up. When 30 minutes is over, move on to your next task so you don’t get overwhelmed.
If you have a bookkeeper, let them know you’re reviewing first half numbers on X date, so your books need to be caught up by Y date. Work together to set a reasonable deadline and expect follow through from both sides.
Reflect by reviewing your key numbers for the first six months of the year, the same period in the prior year, and your plan for this year. You might be shocked by the comparisons!
Reset by identifying the biggest surprises (good or bad). In either case, dig a little deeper. What was your expectation vs. the actual result? What one or two factors contributed most to the wildly different outcome? Make a plan to do more (or less) of those key contributors in the second half of the year.
As you head into the second half of the year, don’t forget to pause, reflect and reset. Let me know if you try it, and what ah-ha moment this simple process provided!
