Questions an owner should be able to answer

The problem it solves

There is a scene that repeats every month. The accountant explains, the owner nods, the meeting ends in twenty minutes and nobody leaves with a decision. There was no disagreement because there was no conversation: one person spoke a language the other never had a reason to learn.

What follows is not ignorance. It is quiet delegation. Someone who cannot phrase the question ends up accepting whichever answer arrives, and eventually stops asking rather than look uninformed in their own office. The large decisions still get made — hiring, buying equipment, borrowing, moving a price — but they get made on operating instinct and justified afterwards with whichever number is closest to hand. It shows in small things: the monthly report nobody opens, the bank's question the owner cannot answer, the partner who asks whether the business is doing well and is told how busy everyone is.

The cost is not one bad call. The person who signs needs an interpreter to understand their own company, and when that interpreter is missing, or simply does not mention what nobody asked, the warnings the numbers gave early are found once they are urgent. The gap is not a missing accounting course. It closes when someone knows which questions a business answers with money and where each answer lives, which is precisely what nobody ever explained to the person who signs.

What it covers

The workshop does not teach accounting. It starts from the other end, with the questions an owner is entitled to answer about their own company — whether it makes money, whether it can pay what it owes, where the cash is trapped, which part of the business is carrying the rest, how long it holds out before it needs financing — and works backwards to the figure that settles each one. The angle is deliberate. The person running the company does not need to produce financial information; they need to know how to ask for it, how to tell when an answer misses the question, and how to separate a question a figure can settle from one that calls for a decision.

Vocabulary appears only where it is needed. Margin, liquidity, fixed cost, working capital and cash flow arrive as instruments for asking a question precisely, not as definitions to memorize. Each term is anchored in a situation the participants recognize from their own operation, and anything nobody in the room can use is dropped. Along the way, three things that everyday conversation lumps together are pulled apart, profit, cash and equity, because mixing them up sits behind many of the decisions that later come as a surprise.

Being an intensive format, the room works more than it listens. Each participant drafts their own questions and tests them against the group: can they actually be answered, with what figure, from which source, and how often should the answer arrive? The ones that fail the test get rewritten on the spot. Then everyone builds a glossary of the terms they actually needed, put in the words of their own business.

The second half is about the conversation that comes afterwards: what to ask your accountant for, how often, in what format, and which answers mean something needs a closer look. That meeting is rehearsed in pairs, one person presenting the figures and the other having to decide on them, because only in practice does it become clear which questions change the direction of the conversation. Nobody reads statements line by line here; that is separate work. You leave with questions on paper rather than notes: the ones you will answer every month, a glossary fitted to your operation, an agenda for that meeting with a name against each item, and a written request to whoever keeps your records. The questions nobody in the company can answer today are rarely only financial, and Business 360, which reads a business's seven engines side by side, is how ALUD shows which other areas they are tied to.

What participants learn

• Ask the financial questions that belong to the owner rather than to the accountant.
• Use the terms that run through every conversation about money, and use them precisely.
• Identify which source answers each question, and how often it should be reaching you.
• Tell a question that a figure can settle from one that requires a decision.
• Hold a monthly numbers meeting without depending on someone to translate it.

Agenda

1. 01The questions a business answers with money, and the ones it does not
2. 02Profit, cash and equity: three different things spoken of as one
3. 03Fixed and variable costs, seen through the decisions they constrain
4. 04Margin: what is left after what
5. 05Liquidity and solvency: paying this week versus staying in business
6. 06Where each answer comes from: the records, the bank, the operation
7. 07What to ask your accountant for, in what format and how often
8. 08The signals that mean you should look closer before deciding

What the organization leaves with

• A written list of the questions you will answer about your company every month.
• Your own glossary, with each term translated into the operation you run.
• An agenda for a monthly numbers meeting, with fixed items and an owner for each.
• A written request to whoever keeps your records, with format and dates.