Creative Businesses & Entrepreneurs

When MyCake first launched in 2007, our goal was to improve the financial health and resilience of creative and cultural businesses by helping creative entrepreneurs manage their finances better.

This took the form of providing access to online book-keeping software, and augmenting it with workshops, newsletters and business development support.

Whilst it is no longer the core of our work, we have over a decade of experience in it, and still love delivering the service.

Robust processes for the financial management of your business – processes that are appropriate to the size, scale and complexity of your specific business – put you in a position to ask questions about your financial health, growth and future.

If you think doing your accounts is a tedious task to be done in January just before submitting your tax return to HMRC, we’d encourage you to see the potential in this data. It can tell you all sorts of other things which might help you develop your future success – such as:

• What does success look like financially? How does this balance against my definition of creative success?
• What daily rate should I charge, and what do other people base their prices on?
• Where does 80% of my paid work come from?
• Which of my clients are most profitable? How do I find more clients like those?
• Does too much of my work come from one single source, and what would happen if that client disappeared?
• Am I holding enough stock | too much stock, and is that a good use of my money?
• How much of my time is spent doing things that I can’t charge for vs. doing billable work or developing new clients?
• How many billable days are there in a year? (In our opinion it’s about a hundred – once you’ve done all your admin and business development activities.)