Improve your Cash Flow
Improving your cash flow is key to stabilizing or expanding your company. Creating a good forecast, and following it, is an important step toward developing a beneficial cash flow to meet your Company’s requirements. Review the terms set for your Accounts Receivable and Payable and see if there are any opportunities to decrease the gap between them. Your inventory also plays an important role in your cash flow. Determine if you require more of a “supply on demand” type of inventory, instead of purchasing/producing items that are only sold occasionally, without affecting lead times for your customers.
Manage your Accounts Receivable and Payable
Managing your Accounts Receivable and Payable can lead to improved Cash Flow and reducing the risk of default by clients.
Review the terms that you have set with your Customers. For instance – if your customer usually pays in 60 days, can both you and your customer agree on 45 days, without jeopardizing the relationship that you have? Are you able to offer a discount to your customers, for earlier payment terms, without making a large reduction to your gross margin? Contacting your customers for payment before the due date is also important to reduce late payments and encourage early notification if there are any discrepancies that need investigating before the payment is overdue.
Make sure you pay your suppliers on time! You do not want to risk any conflicts between you and your supplier that may endanger any future negotiation with regard to contract terms or discounts. Do not disregard any discounts that your supplier may offer for early payment. Review it and ensure that this will benefit your Company. Alternatively negotiate with your suppliers potential discounts for faster payment terms.
Payroll Services
Payroll Services is a specialized service requiring full time updates on government regulations and can be provided at low cost by an outside source.
Cost Accounting
Cost Accounting allows you to set selling prices and to analyze where cost reductions might be obtained. Take a proactive approach for your business rather than trying to catch up. Analysing and evaluating indirect/direct labour, material and overhead are essential for any type of organization. Understanding your variable and fixed costs are very important for decision making for sales and production. Helping to understand the history and present costs of running an organization can be beneficial to easier analyze the outcome for the future.
Business Advisory Services
Providing business advisory services allows you to reflect on unresolved issues and set a path to overcome them. Day to day operations tend to absorb most of our time. Small unresolved issues, if ignored, can become larger issues over time. Reflecting on them with an outsider, generating and evaluating potential solutions and acting on them will ensure smooth sailing going forward.
Prepare Financial Plans
Preparing financial plans is the basis for longer term projections. The basis for the financial plan is the business forecast. Financial plans translate this forecast into numbers, allowing you to see the financial consequences as the forecast is realized. It also allows to analyze what happens and what is required for any variation to the forecast. The financial plan will form the basis of your business plan.
Trade Financing
Apply for (trade) financing requires you presenting the company to selected financing companies, who understand your business. Often selective government support may help.
A business plan has to be prepared including a company history, key management experience, a business forecast and of course financials and financial projections.
Financing takes many forms from documentary credit, securing a credit line or loan, and/or reaching out to investors to support your business on a temporary or long term basis.
Often a mix of the above accomplishes the best result for your company.
Prepare your Company for a Potential Sale
The sale of a company can be a transfer to family members, a management buy-out, a buy-out of a partner, or an outright sale to a third party of assets or shares owned in the company. Regardless, to sell your company for its maximum fair value needs thorough preparation. A business plan may form the basis to value the company. There are several basic methods to determine the fair financial value of a going concern, using the capitalized earnings, capitalized cash flow, or discounted cash flow, or net assets approach. Of course the value for comparable companies in the market should also be considered.