Thursday, February 18, 2010

The More User-Friendly Version of Bookkeeping Analysis, Part 1

It feels like I've been spending A LOT of time working on these numbers, and when I posted them up last week, I thought I could finally be free from their hold on me. The task still was just not as complete as I had hoped. I, myself, was still going bonkers looking at ALL those percentages all at once.

Yesterday, I decided the best way for me to understand it all, would be to break it down into smaller groups of numbers.

First, I wanted to see how each percentage compared with an ideal, "average" throughout the year. Breaking 100% down by 12 (months per year), that number is 8.3%. So I looked through each category, and found the months that came closest to that 8.3%. But then, I also realized that just because there were some that were very close to "average," it didn't necessarily mean that was a GOOD thing. Sometimes it's better to be ABOVE or BELOW average, not spot on. So I took it two steps further, and found the Best of, and Worst of each category.

I then also scored each month by my new breakdown numbers--Closest to 8.3%, Best Of, and Worst Of, and looked at those 3 numbers to give each month an overall score.

Unfortunately, Google Documents doesn't want to read my Microsoft Works Word Processor document that this is all laid out on an easy to view and compare format, so I had to just list them month by month among the 3 new categories. My scores are at the end. See if you agree, or if I'm being too nice/hard on myself with the scores. I gotta say, by looking at the numbers this way, I was a bit surprised... some months didn't score as high as I thought they would, and others did much better than I thought previously also.

Here it is.

No comments:

Post a Comment