Fifteen questions that reveal whether your books are built to file a tax return — or to actually run your business.
How this works. Answer honestly — nobody sees this but you, and a flattering score helps you not at all. It takes about six minutes. At the end you'll get a score out of 30, a breakdown across five areas, and a specific read on what to fix first.
One thing worth saying up front: almost every owner scores badly on at least one domain, and most score badly on two. That isn't a judgment on how you run your business. It reflects the fact that small-business accounting is built by default for tax compliance, and nobody ever set it up to answer operating questions. That's a design problem, not a competence problem — and design problems are fixable.
The most common blind spot, and the most expensive.
Whether the system underneath can answer a question at all.
Where reported revenue and real revenue quietly diverge.
What happens when a lender, a buyer, or a partner asks.
Whether the numbers reach the decisions.
I send one email a week to owner-operators: how to read your own numbers, what buyers actually look at, and the mistakes that quietly cost the most. No pitch, no fluff.