Millions of small business owners have used LivePlan products to start their businesses. Every week, we hear stories from small business owners thanking us for helping them develop a business plan and secure funding.

Palo Alto Software does more than build LivePlan, the world's best business planning software. We also run Bplans, a website dedicated to original and curated business planning and business management content.

When you’re looking toward the future, one of the best ways to ensure that your predictions are accurate is by looking at the past. 2018 was a year full of technical advances and major changes. AI, VR, AR, and machine learning were everywhere.

“My clients don’t want this.”

This is what I hear from many accountants when I talk to them about Strategic Advising.

“I wish my accountant would explain things better.”

This is what I hear from small businesses owners—even my artist friend who I saw last week. We were catching up and I began talking about Strategic Advising. “What?!” he said. “I would love it if my accountant would provide that kind of help!”

Somewhere there is a disconnect.

Small businesses want help from accountants on strategic planning and financial forecasting. This word cloud represents a summary of popular responses from small businesses when we asked them this question:

“If you could get help in one area of your business right now, what would it be?”

When starting a new business, surely your focus needs to be on getting the business and the product up and running. You only have a few employees at most, so there’s nothing to worry about on the “people” front.

Right? Wrong.

You and your business partner decided to go into business together for a number of reasons—probably in part to leverage each of your strengths so you’re more likely to succeed.

Ongoing collaboration is essential to your mutual success. In this ultimate guide to business partner collaboration, we’ll go over how to improve your collaboration and communication skills so you can grow your business together.

Helping a client to build a more profitable and successful business is one of the most valuable things we can do. It would be crazy to price this work based on time—that would leave too much money on the table.

This article on website optimization is pulled from LivePlan’s Best Practice webinar on sales and marketing for your accounting firm. Our own marketing director John Procopio offers concrete advice for assessing your website, and he offers a two-step checklist for implementing changes.

Anyone who has been providing client services for a while has processes that they follow. But there is a difference between haphazard processes that have grown organically, and processes that are intentional, well-considered, and documented. The difference between the former and the latter is the difference between having a firm that is merely surviving, and one that is thriving.

There’s no doubt social media sites are marching forward in their quest to take over the rest of the internet. Once a repository for news feeds, career advice, and silly cat memes, social sites are now going toe-to-toe with more traditional channels for their share of the advertising and ecommerce spoils.

Cash is king. You’ve heard it forever, but do you know what it really means?

Cash in this context isn’t bills or coins, it’s money in the bank that you can spend today. It’s the single most important resource in any business, and also one that is way too frequently misunderstood.

I am often asked during LivePlan training sessions: “When should I do a full business plan for my client, and how do I charge for it?” It’s a great question because it gets to the heart of advisory services.

Advisory services, done right, do not involve writing a traditional business plan.

One of my biggest challenges at Palo Alto Software is figuring out which ideas to pursue and which ideas to put on the back burner. I have the luxury of working with a bunch of really smart people, so new ideas for things that we could do come up all the time.

I distinctly remember the moment I met Ingrid Edstrom, bookkeeper and founder of Polymath LLC. It was at the Scaling New Heights conference for accounting professionals in 2016, in the Bahamas. Everything was big: the resort, the ocean, the show itself.