EP496: Paul Lodder - Turning Cash Flow Into Strategic Advisory

Spotlight: So for me, the opportunity now is huge with accountants and bookkeepers to provide more of a proactive service, more forecasting, more future visibility. But certain things have to be in place for that to happen. You're listening to the Spotlight Edition of The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Louie Prosperi. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com, the proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to The Successful Bookkeeper. Professional Bookkeeper Podcast. I'm Louis Prosperi. Our guest is the VP of Accounting Products and Strategy at Dext, Paul Lauder. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Lovely to be here. So tell us about the study that Dext just did recently that will be very useful to our professionals. Yeah. So, so in terms of the study we recently undertook, we're aware there is a lot of challenges in the Canadian market at the moment, whether that be changes around tax policy, political uncertainty. All of these things are having an impact. And our study reached out to 500 SMB leaders across Canada to get a feel for how, how are they at the moment? What are the pressures they're facing? How are they managing to address some of those challenges? And where is the focus going forward? Whenever there's a period of uncertainty, it always leads to additional sort of stress and, and concern for SMBs. So what was interesting here is your— one of your questions was asked, and 42% of SMEs are fearing closure. That's a pretty high number. Um, what was the reason? What was their main reason or reasons that they're giving related to that closure issue?

There's a lot of reasons that can come into play here when they're worried about closure. If we take a look at the sort of big macro sort of impact, you've got inflationary pressures and you've got inflationary pressures. There's only so far often business owners can put their prices up. But if you're not in control of that, it starts to impact the margins. Some of that has actually been linked to the sort of worry around tariffs as well. Now, tariffs has been going on for the story around that for a long, long time globally as well. So, so that's causing, you know, particularly if you're an importer or an exporter, there are some additional challenges there. And what you often find is when