5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Business’s Finances

This article doesn’t need much introduction, does it?  Who doesn’t want to improve the finances of their business?

If you’re in business, regardless of your personal and business goals, you want to succeed.  Well, your finances have a lot to do with the success of your business.

Here’s 5 easy ways you can improve the finances of your business:

Systems and Processes

Use systems and processes to manage your business finances.

For example, having a process around when and how a customer is invoiced ensures the invoice is raised at soon as possible, which means it gets paid as soon as possible.  This supports cash flow, as well as showing your true profitability in your Profit and Loss Account.

We live in an age of technology, which means there’s great tech available for SME businesses to help them with their processes and systems.  Apps and cloud accounting systems help you to keep on top of your finances, whenever and wherever you are.

The Right Resource

Your record and bookkeeping are hugely important to supporting and improving your business’s finances.  So many businesses leave it to the last minute, are inconsistent, or use unqualified staff to keep on top of this though.  Here’s a few of the issues this causes:

• Inaccuracies in information
• Inconsistency in the recording of transactions
• Lost or missing paperwork, receipts, information
• Incorrect recording of costs, tax and VAT
• Poor information used to run your business

Having the right bookkeeping staff/resource supports your record keeping and the business’s finances.

Operating a Budget

Operating a budget in your business helps you manage and utilise your business’s finances in the best ways, and in the right area.  It’s like using a map, or sat nav, to get to your destination when starting a journey.

Operating a budget, and monitoring your finances against that budget, means you’re not going to be spending money on unnecessary things that won’t benefit your overall goal.  This is a great way to improve profitability and cash flow.

Keep on Top of It

Not being up to date with your bookkeeping can impact everything; cash flow, profit, taxes and the decisions you need to make.

Have you:

• Chased a customer for an invoice who had already paid because you weren’t on top of your bookkeeping?
• Missed that a customer hadn’t paid, and found yourself short of that cash?
• Overestimated your profit because you hadn’t recorded all of the costs yet?

Staying on top of your finances helps you to improve on them!  And means you have the information you need, when you need it, for decision making purposes.

The Right information

With all your finances up to date in a timely manner and operating to a budget, with an accounting system and processes in place you have the right information to improve those finances.

Knowledge and information are powerful for helping you to achieve your goals.  Regularly reviewing your financial information helps you to stay on track towards those goals as well.  If you begin to deviate for any reason, you realise before it’s too late and it becomes and costly deviation, so you can get back on the right track.

How do we help you with this?

At Elite Accounting we’re great fans of Xero and Dext, and include them in the majority of our client packages free of charge.  Xero has a suit of apps that connect to it as well, to help you work smarter, not harder.

We also provide an outsourced finance team and/or bookkeeping services and can stay on top of your record and bookkeeping, so you don’t have to.

If you need help with how best to use the right information, we can help with management accounts service.

Check out our Services pages for more information!