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Where does all your cash actually go?
By Adam Litster, CPA — Better Biz Info · Originally shared with subscribers of The Profit Shift.
Your Money Doesn’t Have to Be a Mystery
Most of the owners I talk to share a quiet, similar feeling about their money.
You work hard. The business does well. Money comes in. But if you stopped and asked where it all actually went last month, you might not be sure. That’s not a knock on you — it’s that the money you earn, the money you owe, and the money you keep all run through one account and blur together.
Here’s the good news: that feeling is almost always a visibility problem, not a you problem — and it’s very fixable. The owners who feel calm and in control aren’t smarter than you; they just look at their numbers more often, and in a way that actually makes sense.
This week I’ll show you how — and hand you a new tool we built that does most of the work for you. Want to see what it produces first?
Why your cash flow can feel like a mystery
For most owners, the reason is simple: you only look at the full picture once a year, at tax time. By then the year is over, and every decision you could have made is in the past.
That’s the trap: looking once a year means you’re always reacting to what already happened, never shaping what comes next. It’s the lesson we keep coming back to in The Profit Shift — reacting to your numbers is exhausting and gets you nowhere. A rhythm is what creates calm.
Annual is an autopsy. Quarterly is a check-up.
Ninety days is the sweet spot — long enough to show a real trend, short enough that you can still act on it. It’s also where it starts in our VPS framework : Visibility before Profitability before Scalability. You can’t improve what you pay yourself, your pricing, or your tax surprise until you can see where the money goes.
What a real money review actually looks at
A real review isn’t just glancing at your P&L and feeling vaguely okay. It looks closely at three things:
Owners often see a profit on their Profit and Loss or tax return and wonder why that cash isn’t in the bank. You need real visibility into where the cash actually went. We recommend evaluating your cash flow through the Profit First lens — finding exactly how much cash went toward paying you (the owner), your income taxes, operating costs (including payroll), and what was left over as a real cash profit.
Then walk through your expenses, line by line, sorting each one: Keep, Reduce, or Cut . This is where the quiet leaks hide — forgotten subscriptions, overlapping tools, a loan you’ve never refinanced. The quick wins are usually bigger than owners expect.
You don’t leap to perfect. You nudge your operating expenses 1–2% per quarter toward a healthy target. Tiny, doable moves that compound into real profit over several quarters.
This is built on the Profit First method by Mike Michalowicz — allocate your profit first, and run the business on what’s left.
A sample practice bringing in over $1 million a year was paying its owner just 7.2% of real revenue (healthy is ~20%) and keeping only 3.1% as profit (healthy is ~10%). Operating expenses were quietly eating 86% — when ~55% is normal.
Nothing was “wrong.” The owner just hadn’t been shown the gap.
Meet the tool that does it for you
Here’s the honest catch: doing that whole review by hand takes time most owners don’t have — and many don’t even know where to start. So we built it into a tool that does it for you, with zero effort: the Profit First Instant Assessment .
Here’s how it works: you connect your QuickBooks (read-only — revoke it anytime, and we never store your raw books). Then, in about five minutes, it runs the whole review above and hands you:
It even checks the health and accuracy of your QuickBooks data and flags anything that may need cleanup or a closer look — because your numbers are only as good as the data behind them.
In other words, it turns the most overwhelming part of your finances into a five-minute habit — you go from guessing to knowing , from “I should really look at this” to a clear picture and a short list of next moves. That’s the whole shift: from hoping to steering.
The Profit First Instant Assessment is available now — no subscription, no commitment. Connect QuickBooks, and in about five minutes you’ll have your full profit-and-cash-flow picture, your biggest quick wins, and a clear plan — with branded reports you keep.
And if it’s not useful, we’ll refund you — no questions. See where your money’s really going, or your money back.
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The Profit Shift. A short weekly note on profit and cash flow for service business owners.
Want help putting this to work in your business? Take the free Profit Assessment, book a free call, or explore our Fractional CFO & coaching.
