Scenario: Preparing Your Financials to Talk to Your Accountant
How to use AskBiz CFO data to prepare a clear, accurate financial summary before meeting your accountant — covering cash position, expenses, and P&L.
Key Takeaways
- A five-minute AskBiz review before an accountant meeting ensures you arrive with accurate, current figures rather than guessing.
- Clean expense categorisation in AskBiz significantly reduces the time and cost of accountant-prepared reports.
- The Intelligence tab P&L view gives your accountant a starting-point income statement without them needing to manually compile figures.
The Situation
You have a meeting with your accountant next week — either for a quarterly review, year-end tax preparation, or a business finance conversation. Rather than arriving unprepared and spending expensive billable time gathering basic numbers, you want to walk in with a clear, accurate financial picture. AskBiz CFO provides all the key figures you need.
Step 1 — Confirm Expense Data Is Clean
Your accountant's job is much easier — and your bill smaller — when your expense data is clean and correctly categorised. Before the meeting, open the Expenses tab in AskBiz and filter by the period your accountant is working on (typically the current financial year or the last quarter). Sort by category and look for any expenses marked Uncategorised. Recategorise each one correctly. Also check for any obvious miscategorisations — a supplier invoice in the Marketing category that should be in Cost of Goods Sold, for example. Ten minutes spent cleaning the data before the meeting saves 30 to 60 minutes of billable accountant time.
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See this in action for your business
AskBiz tracks these metrics automatically — just connect your data and start asking questions.
Start for free →Step 2 — Capture the Four CFO Headline Numbers
From the Cash Flow tab, note four numbers: current cash balance, monthly net gain or burn rate, monthly fixed cost total, and cash runway in months. These four figures answer the questions your accountant will likely ask in the first five minutes of the meeting: How is cash? What are you spending per month? Is the business profitable? How long can you sustain current operations? Having these numbers immediately available — rather than saying I think we have about $40,000 somewhere — signals that you are in control of your finances.
Step 3 — Pull the P&L Summary
Navigate to the Intelligence tab and open the P&L summary view. Take a screenshot of the current P&L, which shows revenue, Cost of Goods Sold, Gross Profit, Operating Expenses, and Net Profit for the period. This screenshot gives your accountant a starting-point income statement that they can verify against your connected store data and bank records. It also makes the conversation more focused — instead of working out the numbers together during the meeting, you can spend the time discussing what the numbers mean and what to do about them.
Step 4 — Prepare Three Specific Questions
An accountant meeting is most valuable when you arrive with specific questions, not just a request to review the numbers. Use your AskBiz review to generate these questions. For example: AskBiz shows my COGS as 34 percent of revenue — is that typical for my industry and should I be working to reduce it? My cash runway is nine months but I want to hire in three months — how do I structure the business to ensure the hire is tax-efficient? My burn rate has been declining for four months — what tax planning should I be doing in anticipation of profitability? Specific, data-grounded questions make the meeting productive for both sides.