Assessment of Types of Records and their Influence on the Performance of Furniture Workshops in Machakos County, Kenya

The purpose of this study was to assess the types of records and their influence on the performance of furniture workshops in Machakos County: Kenya. This was prompted by the slow growth and poor performance of the furniture ventures. The study will be significant to SMEs furniture firms’ owners in Machakos since it will be able to understand how record keeping can improve the performance of their furniture business. They will also learn from the results on how effectively to keep records and therefore be able to take measures to improve or employ record keeping. Records continuum theory of record keeping and resource based view theories was used to guide this study. A descriptive survey study design was employed throughout this research as it allowed for the collection of both qualitative and quantitative data. The population studied was the SMEs furniture workshops in Machakos County. This comprises SME furniture workshop owners, records keeping personnel. Simple random sampling was used to select the respondents. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data. Data was grouped, coded, cleaned and analyzed descriptively using SPSS to generate frequencies and percentages. The collected data was presented in tables generated using SPSS 17.0.The study employed the Pearson correlation coefficient in order to establish the degree of correlation between record keeping and business performance. Regression analysis was conducted to establish the form of relationship between the different types of records kept, (independent variable) and the (dependent variable) performance of the furniture workshops. All the ethical issues pertaining to research was adhered to the entire process of this research. The study revealed that very few number of furniture business entrepreneurs in Machakos county maintained business records. The study concluded that poor record keeping is part of the main challenges facing proprietors of furniture business in Machakos County. The researcher recommended that, the county Government and other stakeholders responsible for Small business and enterprises development should develop the suitable record keeping guidance which will be easier and simple to understand with such sector.  This guidance system may have to go together by establishing a record keeping as a legal mandatory to all SMEs business. County government in conjunction with the national government should develop training programmes and courses aimed at small business owners and their respective staffs. This will ensure that the small business owners are equipped with adequate business knowledge as will result to respect on record keeping of their business.