Chapter 3. Fun and Eye-opening Part - Reports and Charts

"…over the past few years running our online wedding business, I have come to realize that while keeping accurate numbers is boring, analyzing the numbers is actually fun and eye opening!"—from a successful small business owner's web site.

As a small business owner, you may rely on gut feelings to make some important decisions. Some of those decisions can make or break a small business such as yours. It is prudent to challenge and validate those decisions by collecting more facts and figures. It doesn't mean that you should abandon the value provided by the gut feelings and intuition that you bring to your decision-making every day. It simply means that you are going to have to start validating it with more data.

Some of that data on who needs your product or service will come from outside your business in the form of market intelligence and demographic data. However, a more important source of information about the revenue and costs...