Amanda Westenbarger

Article 1 ended with a question. When does your COO actually talk to Accounting before a decision gets made? How long did it take you to answer? Immediately? Minutes? Maybe you could not think of a single example. Bills get paid, projects keep moving, and financial reports show up. Nothing feels obviously broken, so you conclude everything is fine. If that question made you uncomfortable, you are not alone. Here is the part that keeps this problem alive. You only know what good looks like based on what you have already lived through. Most owners have never worked inside a business where Operations and Accounting were intentionally built to function together. So they measure their company against their own status quo. This article gives you a different reference point. You will see what the relationship looks like day to day, what rhythm it runs on, and five things you can check this week. None of it requires scrapping what you have built. The people are already in the building. The data already exists. What changes is how the pieces are arranged, and how much leverage you get out of the company you have right now.  ​ Part 2 of a 5-part series on the COO-Accounting relationship

"Accounting is a stick in the mud." "I'm not really sure what a COO does all day." "The CFO just plays around with their little Excel sheets." You have probably heard one of those lines. You may have thought one yourself. They sound like harmless office humor. They actually point to something expensive. In most growing service businesses, nobody has ever defined how operations and accounting work together. The people who produce your financial reports sit outside the very decisions those reports are meant to inform. That gap costs you every single month, quietly, in profit that should have been there.  ​ Part 1 of a 5-part series on the COO and Accounting relationship