Here’s How To Make Numbers Fun In 2023

If you’re a right-brained creative at heart, the words numbers, money, reporting and profit margin probably make your eyes glaze over. If you’re a visual person, typical finance strategies won’t work for you. Instead, try these tactile, colourful and humanised hacks to kickstart 2023.

Focus On Opportunity Not Restriction

Change the way you think of money. For creatives, money can conjure up feelings of sacrifice. For example, saving 10% of your profit isn’t eating into your fun money, it’s creating an opportunity for you. 

Flipping this switch can transform your relationship with money – your money mindset! Write a list of your money tasks then re-write it stating how this positively impacts your future followed by the task itself. 

  • Invoice Clients ➡️Create Magic & Buy The Fancy Coffee Beans: Invoice Clients 
  • Sign BAS for Lodgement ➡️Make Your Mark & Keep Creating: Sign BAS

Keep this list where you can see it! Before you know it, you’ll see money as a tangible way to have fun (gasp!) and achieve, rather than a creativity-blocking ball and chain.

Inject Fun Into Your Business Finances

Creatives need novelty and fun to get it done. Throw out the rule book and revolutionise how to do the numbers thing this year. 

  • Rename your accounts to align with you. Is it a savings account or a Glitter Fund? Have you got a tax account or is it a Pay The Man Without Breaking A Sweat account?
  • Make a vision board and hang it above your desk. You can add anything to this; luxe shoes, bougie holidays – the sky’s the limit. Then, add a visual money tracker to it. Use stickers or even colour it in as you grow. Marrying those dreams to your finances is crucial because as nice as 3% profit growth sounds, it doesn’t mean much if you can’t see it! 
  • Customise your reminders so they feel good rather than gloomy. Is your BAS Payment Due or have you Made It Rain 🤑This Quarter! [Pay Your BAS & Keep It Flowin’! 💅]

Find every money touchpoint you have and put a positive spin on it. Trust me, you’ll feel the right vibes and look forward to managing your money this year.

Customise Your Dashboard

Rows and rows of numbers aren’t your friends. Instead of forcing yourself to scroll through endless yawn-worthy reports, make your life easier with a visual dashboard. If you’re using accounting software (like Xero!) you customise your dashboard in just a few clicks.

A typical dashboard includes:

  • Account Watchlist: track your income, GST, Tax + Super at a glance 
  • Business Bank Account: check your transactions with ease
  • Money You Are Owed: keep your eye on who has and hasn’t paid your invoices 
  • Bills You Need To Pay: a snapshot of your upcoming and overdue bills 
  • Cash In & Out: get a monthly overview of your income vs expenses 
  • Business Performance: track your overall profit and customise it to suit

HOT TIP: Add what you need to know and omit what you don’t. 

Keep it simple and avoid overwhelm. 

Customise your view to include colourful pie graphs, bar graphs and more! 

Get the how-to here: https://central.xero.com/s/article/Your-Xero-dashboard 

Get A Crew To Support You

If you lean towards the big picture stuff and simply don’t care about the detail like coding your expenses, enlist support. Not just any old support though, find people who can speak your language. 

Working with creatives (and being a creative who happens to love figures) has taught me a thing or two about how to deliver finance-y things. For example, I know long-winded emails coupled with bland reports won’t be read. So if that’s you, we can customise some shorter reports or some colourful graphs and the like 📊
Find yourself a bookkeeper who will love the detail, manage the numbers and communicate in a way that excites and ignites your creativity.

Lisa x

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