The pandemic has been hard on everyone, financially, mentally, and professionally.  As a business leader, you may be bottom-line driven, but taking care of your employees is essential. They are the ones who make your bottom line possible and good leaders realize this.  Once the health crisis ends, recruiting talent will continue to be a challenge. The following six actions can be used to ensure employees feel supported and positive about their roles in the company.   1) Listen and Inform In times like these, being available, helpful, and kind is even more important than in the past.  Let your employees know…

If you own your own business, you may have encountered times when finances (particularly cash flow) have become a problem.  A lot of business owners ignore the problem until it is too late, rather than ask for a professional advice early on.  It helps to know the early signs of insolvency so that action can be taken to avert a crisis.  These signs include: operating at bank credit limit, under pressure from suppliers, loss of significant customers, shrinking profit margins, depleting rainy day fund, forced to cut non-essential business expenses, conducting asset sales to generate short term cash flow, struggling…

COVID-19 and related government measures (including shutdowns, restrictions, and protective measures) are having significant impacts on Canadian companies.  CPA Canada issued an alert in March, 2020 to discuss Accounting Standards for Private Enterprises (ASPE), which are small and medium-sized companies that do not report their financial results publicly and their shares are not traded on a public stock exchange. The CPA Canada alert was for management to provide sufficient information on their private enterprise financial statements (including notes) with December 31, 2019 year-ends, when very few COVID-19 impacts were reported in Canada.  Management disclosure of post December 31, 2019 COVID-19 events…