I should mention that the numbers so far are preliminary based on my own bookkeeping, so I'll talk to my accountant about how to better map the transactions to my balance sheet and income statement.
Definitely good to get professional help so you can focus on the business. That being said, don't let them overcomplicate it. The thing about business, especially one that involves inventory, is that you're always looking at both accounting profit/loss, and cashflow.
Cashflow is the more important one, especially if you'd like to hit your 600k revenue goals as mentioned elsewhere. You can run an accounting loss almost forever as long as your cashflow is positive. This is how Amazon did it - they paid their suppliers (cash going out) less frequently than money coming in.
Interesting about the different component aspects - to get to 600k, I think you will certainly need to build some standardisation into your inventory, in terms of how many finished units you're holding, and establish a buying cadence.
One other element that can help plan is what you end up doing for the sales effort. If the sales is consistent (ie, you're blogging and that pulls in a relatively-consistent amount of traffic/sales), then you know your inventory level to plan for, and can just add a buffer. Same with ads/etc, there are ways to make the sales generation more mechanical, which helps with your inventory planning, which is the main driver of your profit.
Thanks! Yes, book recommendations would be welcome.
The struggle I've had so far is that I feel like I'm in a weird in-between space between super simple and super complicated. When I look for inventory software, some solutions are for the basic case of people selling t-shirts or sneakers with no concept of subcomponents. And then when I look for software that supports bills of materials or "kitting" it's ultra-complicated and assumes I have multiple warehouses and do everything through purchase orders.
Definitely good to get professional help so you can focus on the business. That being said, don't let them overcomplicate it. The thing about business, especially one that involves inventory, is that you're always looking at both accounting profit/loss, and cashflow.
Cashflow is the more important one, especially if you'd like to hit your 600k revenue goals as mentioned elsewhere. You can run an accounting loss almost forever as long as your cashflow is positive. This is how Amazon did it - they paid their suppliers (cash going out) less frequently than money coming in.
Interesting about the different component aspects - to get to 600k, I think you will certainly need to build some standardisation into your inventory, in terms of how many finished units you're holding, and establish a buying cadence.
One other element that can help plan is what you end up doing for the sales effort. If the sales is consistent (ie, you're blogging and that pulls in a relatively-consistent amount of traffic/sales), then you know your inventory level to plan for, and can just add a buffer. Same with ads/etc, there are ways to make the sales generation more mechanical, which helps with your inventory planning, which is the main driver of your profit.
I can share a few books via email if you're keen.