What is your business worth if you don’t know if it made a profit last month?

Business value is built on sustainable profit, reliable cash flow and manageable risk.

If you cannot see those clearly, you may not know what your business is worth or what is increasing or eroding its value.

New Xero research highlights the problem. More than one in three Australian small business owners (35%) do not often know if they made a profit in the previous month, while 32% are not regularly paying themselves a wage.

Business value can erode unnoticed

Strong revenue or a busy pipeline does not necessarily translate into a valuable business.

Margins may be shrinking. Cash may be tied up in unpaid invoices. Growth may be increasing costs faster than profit. The business may also depend too heavily on its owner, several major customers or undocumented knowledge.

Without timely financial information and decision support, these risks can remain hidden until an owner wants to sell, restructure, introduce another shareholder or fund succession.

By then, there may be limited time to repair them.

Confidence is not the same as control

Xero found that 85% of owners felt confident handling financial issues. However, the majority of financial advisers surveyed (90%) believed small business owners lacked the skills needed to manage their finances effectively.

The research also found that only 37% correctly answered all 10 basic business finance questions, while 41% were afraid to ask financial management questions because they felt they should already know the answers.

The solution is not more reports. It is better decision support.

Owners need current information that helps them act on pricing, margins, costs, cash flow, staffing, customer concentration and growth.

Are your decisions building business value?

A business valuation provides a point-in-time assessment. Regularly reviewing the factors driving that valuation helps owners make decisions that can improve sustainable financial performance, reduce risk and strengthen the business – increasing earnings today and building a stronger exit for tomorrow.

Do you know which decisions are currently building (or eroding) your business value?

Collins Hume’s Strategy360 Business Valuation Specialists help owners understand what your business is worth, what is influencing that value and where change could deliver the greatest commercial benefit.

Source: Xero, “More than 1 in 3 Australian small business owners don’t know if they made a profit last month”, 13 August 2026. Research conducted with independent research agency One Picture.