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At the end of every business year, there are a few things that your company should assess as part of a year-end company review. By doing so, you can get a better idea of how well your company is doing, what you may need to improve in the future, and which issues might need to be addressed.

If you aren’t sure what exactly your business should be assessing as part of your year-end review, here are some of the most important things to look at:

1. Your goals

It’s important to review your company goals for the year so you can see where you hit the mark and where you fell short. This will not only enable you to assess your effectiveness, but it will also help you to set clearer goals for the coming year too.

2. Your cybersecurity

One of the biggest threats to business right now is the threat of cyber hacking and data loss. That is why it is so important that you take the time to audit your cybersecurity each year, or at least get a competent technology risk management company to do so for you. This will help to flag up any holes so that you can better protect your company, and your data, going forward.

3. Your working processes

It’s important to regularly audit your company processes, which include everything from how customer emails are handled to how your equipment is used, so you can identify which processes are good and efficient and which serve no real purpose, or could be improved to boost productivity. These days, you can get software to track most processes including how much time employees spend driving to how long it takes to make one unit of product, so it does not have to be too strenuous an undertaking.

4. Employee retention

How many employees left the company last year? You need to know this so you can figure out if you may not be proving your employees with a pleasant place to work or if you might be losing employees because you do not offer enough staff development opportunities, for example. 

Hiring new employees costs no small amount of time and money, so anything you can do to keep your existing ones is really important, and only by assessing the situation can you get a clearer grasp on it.

5. Customer retention

Of course, finding new customers is much more expensive than keeping existing ones too, so it is also a good idea to go over your customer retention rates and maybe send out a survey to find out why customers have stopped buying your products or services.

Act on those findings and implement changes to hold on to more customers and you can boost your profits while also saving a significant sum in the marketing department too.

If you assess all of the above areas of your business each year, it will enable you to run a more successful company in the long term, which is why you should do so as standard if you're serious about running an effective company.