5 ways to get in control of your business finances

Having proper control of your business finances is a big advantage. It helps you make well-informed business decisions and keeps your organisation profitable.

With so many digital tools for managing your bookkeeping, accounting and management reporting, it's never been easier to manage, track and forecast your financial position.

But what are the main tools you need? And how do you set up your financial systems, apps, processes and reporting to put yourself back in the finance driving seat?

1. Bring your bookkeeping into the digital age

Digital bookkeeping apps are a great way to digitise your receipts, records and source documents. This not only saves a lot of time at year-end, it also makes it much easier for you to keep track of your company’s finances and accounting. Keeping your receipts in a box to manually enter at period-end is no longer enough. Take the next step and digitise your receipts at source, so you have up-to-date digital records and copies of source documents.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software, like Dext Prepare or Auto Entry, scans the receipt, converts it into a digital format and stores it in the cloud.

2. Do your accounting in the cloud

Cloud accounting is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that helps you carry out all your main accounting and financial management online, without having to install any software.

Cloud accounting providers, like Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB or Sage, design their accounting platforms to take the pain and hassle of business accounting. You get all the tools and features you need to work on your accounting tasks. And your platform provider will also take care of all the data storage, backups and security of your data.

A good cloud accounting platform does more than just save your hard drive space. It also provides you with tools and dashboards that improve your access to management information, financial reporting, forecasting and projections, performance tracking and more.

3. Use the latest in expense management tools

Expense management can be a time-consuming and tedious job. But it’s also a vital task that helps you ensure you’re spending company money wisely and not overspending. If employees start going over their budget limits, this can be a costly mistake for the company and your cashflow.

Expense management tools, such as Soldo, Weel or Pleo, help you manage staff spending by giving employees virtual cards that are linked to a specific budget, account and code. This helps you track their expenses easily and make sure they’re staying within their budgeted limits. These platforms also give you detailed reporting and analytics, so you can see where money is being spent, and where savings can be made.

4. Make it easy to accept digital payments

The problem of slow payment is one of the most frustrating things for small businesses. If your customers don’t pay on time, this can result in a loss of revenue, poor cashflow and an inability to cover your basic costs and overheads. To resolve this issue, many companies have begun to switch to digital payment platforms that make it simpler, faster and easier to collect payment.

Payment platforms, like PayPal, Square or Stripe offer faster payment times and more control over the customer experience. Some platforms even integrate with your cloud accounting, so you get automatic bank reconciliations.

5. Embrace the latest in digital reporting and forecasting

With digital accounting changing so rapidly in recent years, there's never been a better time to embrace the benefits of the latest in digital reporting and forecasting.

Economic conditions are hard to predict. So it's crucial to be able to quickly analyse data, check your performance and make predictions about how your company will fare in the coming months. When you use cloud solutions for financial reporting and key metrics, you'll be able to monitor trends in real-time while having access to the data anytime, anywhere.

Having this information at your fingertips helps you make informed decisions faster than ever before – and that translates that into more sales, increased business growth and bigger profits.

If you’re looking to give your finances a touch of digital magic, please do come and talk to us.

We can walk you through the best cloud platforms, fintech apps and business tools to add to your app stack – so you’re ready to make the most of a digital approach to your finances,

Making the most of digital and cloud

Transforming into a digital business sets the best possible infrastructure for your future growth. And, as your business scales, the benefits of going digital will start to become obvious.

Running your key business processes in the cloud and using the latest digital software and apps adds to both your efficiency and your productivity. And, most importantly, digital systems are designed to scale with you as your enterprise grows and the need for resources increases.

Here are some of the big reasons for taking the plunge and diving into digital.

Automate your key manual process to increase efficiency

A scalable business has to systemise its processes and procedures. If your business model is still tied to manual processes and a system that only exists in the owner’s head, you’ll eventually come up against a capacity brick wall. Systemising and automating your processes is a fundamental step when you make the jump to digital.

Look at every internal and external step in your operations and write down how these systems work. Note down each task, who actions what and how the whole system links in with the next step in your operational chain. If there are opportunities to automate a step, automate it. Many business apps now include artificial intelligence (AI) or automation features that can chase up unpaid invoices, send automated replies to customers in live chats, or take automatic payments etc.

Work in the cloud to stay more connected

Since the start of the 2020 pandemic, the world has seen a quantum shift to remote working – and that’s only been possible because of cloud technology. Instead of working from local applications on our laptops or office-based servers, most tech-savvy businesses now use cloud-based apps that are accessible anywhere you have an internet connection.

Switching to cloud-based systems is a game-changer. You and your team are no longer tied to a physical office and can be productive from any WiFi-enabled location. That could be your home, your customer’s warehouse, your regional office or your local coffee shop.

And the benefits aren’t just limited to remote working.

With your applications and databases in the cloud, you can access customer information, sales data or financial numbers wherever you happen to be. Everything is securely backed up and available at the press of a button – that’s an invaluable benefit if you want to be flexible, connected and scalable as a business.

Create your own custom app stack

Your business systems and software no longer have to remain static and based on the office server. By combining a business and accounting platform like Xero with your own choice of business apps, you can create a truly tailored ‘app stack’.

Apps use an API (application programming interface) to connect with each other, share data and form a larger business system. This can include apps to:

• Manage and automate your bookkeeping and accounting tasks
• Send out e-invoices to your customers to speed up payments
• Take automated payments and reconcile your transactions
• Automatically chase late-paying customers and carry out credit control duties
• Project manage your operations and provide detailed reporting
• Manage your job utilisation and time spend on each project
• Keep a detailed real-time inventory of your products
• Send out marketing campaigns and social media posts to your audience
• Interact more closely with your end customers and learn their habits

Talk to us about implementing the appropriate app stack into your business.

Record and track your business data

App integrations and a customer app stack don’t just improve your productivity. Because your apps are connected via APIs and are sharing your business data, you also have access to a wealth of data, information and reporting features.

Look in detail at your cashflow, expenses and spending to improve your cash position. Take a deep dive into your sales and marketing information to find out who your best (and most profitable) customers are.

Run projections and ‘What if…’ scenarios, based on your historical data to forecast the future path of the business. There are plenty of ways to make use of this bountiful data to help you review, understand and improve your performance as a company.

Make better-informed business decisions

A business in the pre-computer age would have had very little information on which to base its decision-making. Annual accounts, cashflow statements and some basic management information would have been available, but there was very little real-time data to refer to.

In the digital age, you can literally see every aspect of your company’s performance in real-time – and, in some cases, in the future as well. That’s a game-changer in so many ways, and something every business owner should be using to improve strategy, financial management, customer experience and business decision-making.

To summarise, a digital business:

• Creates systems that are integrated and connected
• Shares and records all your business data
• Reviews, analyses and finds insights in your business information
• Connects with your customers in more meaningful ways
• Makes better-informed business decisions, as a result.
  
  

Making the most of business data

Are you recording, measuring and analysing enough of the data being generated by your business?

With so many apps and digital solutions now available to businesses, there's a wealth of useful data to trawl through – and plenty of hidden insights for you to benefit from.

Here are 5 ways to get more insights from your business data

1. Track your business finances

Managing your business accounts used to be something you left to your finance director. But with cloud accounting now the norm, every business now has 24/7 online access to detailed information about its financial position and performance. Deeper analysis and insights are usually available at the click of a button, helping you spot the pitfalls and potential opportunities.

Your accounting platform can show you:

• Profit & loss reports and balance sheets, with real-time data to help decision-making
• Cashflow forecasts and projections, to help plan your future cash position
• Budget tracking and spending reports, to stay in full control of your expenditure.

2. Review your credit score

The credit risk rating your company is given by the big credit agencies can have a huge impact on your ability to borrow. A high risk-rating will mean that banks and other lenders will be reluctant to offer you funding. And suppliers will be less open to offering you trade credit.

Some credit bureaus, like Experian, now offer ways to check your business credit score. With a better understanding of your credit data, you can take action to improve your score.

To get in control of your credit position, you should:

• Find out your current credit score and how this is impacting on your ability to borrow
• Check out your payment history and take action to improve performance
• Regularly check this credit data to track improvements or drops in your score.

3. Monitor your sales and marketing data

Steady sales revenues are a must for any business that wants to grow, but how much oversight do you have over your historic and future sales data? Using a sales and marketing platform like Salesforce helps you track your sales, campaigns and customer relationships – giving you a goldmine of data to sift through and analyse:

Key data areas to analyse will include:

• Which products and/or services are making the most sales, and why
• Which customer demographic is the biggest spender, and why they’re advocates
• Which campaigns are delivering the best return on investment (ROI).

4. Track your staff performance

Your people are one of the company’s most important assets. But do you really know how well your employees are performing, or how engaged they are with the goals of the business? Today’s HR software makes it easy to set core skills and capabilities and track how each team member is performing over the course of the year.

As an employer, you can:

• Set performance and training targets, and see how your employees are tracking
• Run satisfaction surveys and staff feedback to check in on team engagement
• Use your data to drive improved performance and happiness in your workforce.

5. Measure your performance against targets

One of the big benefits of tracking your business data is the ability to measure your performance against a given target. Whether it’s a budget target for a new department, or a sales target for a new marketing campaign, you have the performance data at your fingertips. This helps you motivate the team, work towards a common goal and ‘gamify’ your progress as a business.

If you share these targets and performance data with your people at monthly team meetings, this transparency can work wonders for motivation. When your employees, management team and executive team are all aiming for the same goals, you’re a more effective team.

Talk to us about getting more from your data.

Transforming your company into a digital business may seem like the end of the process. But the reality is that getting in control of your data sharing, analytics and performance tracking is the genuine goal for any ambitious business in 2023.

We can help you connect up your app stack and focus on analysing the most important data for business success.

Offering online payment options

If you're a business owner, one of the best things about you can offer your customers and clients is online payment options.

With online options like these listed below, quick payments and receipt funds can be a thing from today!

•  ACH (Automated Clearing House) services like Stripe and Paypal
• credit and debit cards
• direct deposit

While there are a range of online payment options available, the important thing is to choose a provider, or providers, that can integrate with your accounting software.

By doing this, you can add a super-simple payment button to your invoices, which makes it easier for customers and clients to pay you and, therefore, helps you get paid quicker.

Costs

The average fee charged by a merchant service provider is 2-4% of the transaction amount. For Direct Debit it’s usually under $2 per transaction.

Something to consider is that for online payment for invoices over a certain amount, the credit and debit fees can be quite significant. Also, it can be expensive to process transactions when there are multiple customers and clients.

Because the cost of processing online transactions can be significant it’s important to take these charges into account when considering how much you charge for your products or services.

There are a number of apps available that can help you price your products or services. Some of these apps focus on cost-plus pricing, while others use value-based pricing. Ultimately, the right app for you will depend on your specific business needs and goals.

Benefits

Businesses who offer their customers and clients the option of paying online should see a big improvement when it comes to getting paid. 

While not all of your customers and clients will use the online option, many will, which means the time it takes to get paid will reduce – improving your cash flow.

Online payments can also help strengthen your customer/client relationship as anything that makes a process easier is usually appreciated.

We can help you implement the appropriate apps to set up online payments, so feel free to get in touch. 

Do You Know What Reimbursements Your Employees are Claiming For?

It's unfortunate, but employee expense claims are a common form of business fraud. Are you across all your employees' claims for reimbursement?

The best thing you can do to minimise expense claim fraud is to implement a process for reviewing and authorising expenses and reimbursements. Many business owners simply trust people to do the right thing and be honest.

While most employees are reliable, having good systems in place will mean that the dishonest actions of a minority do not jeopardise your business.

Examples of Expense Claim Fraud

• Fictitious expenses based on faked or altered documents or even booking confirmations that were never actually paid for.
• Asking for reimbursement for the made-up cost of goods or services provided for free.
• Collusion with someone in another business who can provide falsified documents to show purchase and payment.
• Personal expenses labelled as business expenses.
• Duplicated claims, for example, an employee might claim for legitimate travel expenses in one month and then claim the same expenses two months later.
• Purchasing an item using the business credit card and providing a personal card to receive the refund when goods are returned.
• Inflating legitimate expenses, such as meals or meeting costs, paid for in cash.

Steps to Proactive Expense Management

• Get a policy in place that includes limits on categories such as travel, office supplies or business meetings, and a clear authorisation process.
• Randomly check all expenses to ensure no staff members are collaborating.
• Get digital credit cards for employees who need to purchase items on behalf of the business regularly. Some solutions allow you to set monthly budgets and limits for specific categories.
• Make it easy for employees. Using a phone app means there is no excuse not to get a photo of the invoice or receipt, and the authorisation process is built into the app.

Mistakes in claims happen, and not all expense claim errors are fraudulent. But by having a procedure in place, you'll soon pick up an innocent mistake compared to deliberate fraud.

Talk to us if you’d like to know more about apps, such as Divipay and Expensify, that provide a systematic process for proactive expense management.

The importance of business development

Business development is one of the most important areas of focus for any ambitious business.

If you want your business to grow, that’s going to mean having a razor-sharp focus on new opportunities and strategies.

That could mean exploring new markets, or nurturing new partnerships. It might mean diversifying to create new revenue streams, or coming up with new ideas to boost your profitability.

Ultimately, good business development comes down to having good ideas – ideas that broaden your reach, sales, revenues and external relationships.

As the founder or CEO, it's important to put business development at the top of your to-do list.

Put time aside for business development

Business opportunities don’t just appear out of thin air (sadly). To come up with an opportunity for a business partnership, or to bring in a big new client, you’re going to have to do some serious work. So, it’s a good idea to put business development (BD) time aside in your diary.

By blocking out time to devote to BD, you can step away from the everyday operational tasks and get into a more creative and objective mindset.

• Where do you want the business to be in 6 months?
• What do you need to do to achieve this goal?
• Are there relationships you could build to bring this plan to life? 

Asking these questions and getting a more concrete idea of the answers will form the basis for your BD plan – and that’s the route map you can then follow.

Work on your BD plan and strategy

Once you have some positive BD ideas to work with, it’s important to get your goals and your strategy down into some form of plan. As with any kind of growth initiative, your BD activity needs to be well planned, so you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve.

Give each new strategic idea a clear timeline and assign jobs, activities and roles to the relevant people in the team. Cost out each project too, and assign a budget so you can be sure that you’re getting the best return on your investment (both financially and from a time perspective).

Most importantly, though, track your progress against your BD goals. Agree on a target, set a date and measure your progress and performance against that timeline.

Build relationships with potential partners and customers

Relationships lie at the heart of your BD activity.

You might be getting to know the executive team at a possible new partner’s company. Or you may be reaching out to a new customer audience with a brand-new product.

Getting to understand what makes these people tick is so important to warming them up as a potential partner, customer or supplier.

Trust is the real key here. 

People are more likely to engage with your business when they trust you as people and as a brand. So, spending time nurturing relationships and networking with other businesspeople and targets is time well spent.

Record, track and analyse your BD performance

With your goals, targets and timelines locked in, you’re ready to start putting this BD plan into action.

But to know if you’re making headway, it’s a good idea to track your performance.

If you’re using project management software or a client relationship management (CRM) app, it’s easy to add notes, record your progress and tick off the key actions in the project. 

You can put the financial reporting tools in your accounting software to good use. Track cashflow for the project, increases in revenue and monitor your sales and marketing expenses etc.

Get ambitious with your BD ideas

No business stands still. Your aims and goals as the owner will change. Your market will evolve and new competitors will appear. Economic conditions and business opportunities will change.

To keep your business at the cutting edge, it’s vital to keep your BD focus alive and well.

Remember to:

• Define your goals and make it clear what you want the business to achieve
• Align your BD activity with the company’s main growth plan
• Log your ideas and potential opportunities and add them to your BD plan
• Warm up your targets and potential partners and keep notes on your progress
• Track your BD performance against your targets, budgets, revenues and timelines
• Keep revisiting your plan and flexing your BD activity to the current market.

If you want to expand your business development activity, get in touch with us. We’ll help you integrate the appropriate apps to support your business development.

Become a digital business

In the online, connected world that we now live in, it’s important for your business to become a digital business.

Digital technology has revolutionised the options you have available as a small business. There are a wealth of cloud-based solutions and apps to help automate your admin, enhance your productivity, open up your business data and market the company online.

Making the technology work for you

Becoming a digital business isn’t about using technology for tech’s sake. It’s about seeing the huge value and potential of applying digital processes and software tools within the company.

By moving your systems, processes and customer interactions over to digital, your small business can quickly become more streamlined, more efficient and more profitable. And with the ineffective elements of the business removed, you’re ready to grow, scale and expand.

Key benefits of digital transformation include:

Cloud accounting at the heart of the businesss

Cloud accounting moves your bookkeeping and financial management online. This gives you access to your accounts, reporting and key performance indicators (KPIs) through your web browser, on any internet-ready device. You can literally run your finances, invoicing, credit control and bank reconciliation from anywhere with Wi-Fi. And that helps you keep in control of the numbers..

Automation of low-level tasks

The manual tasks involved in company admin begin to eat into your business time. Many digital business tools have elements of automation built in, to help you automate the key time-consuming tasks and become more efficient. Automated bookkeeping, automatic bank reconciliation and automated payment collection all put hours back in to the business and help you do more.

Fintech and payments

Keeping on top of your finances isn’t just about accounting. Financial technology (fintech) tools help you ensure that money is flowing into the business, cashflow is being managed sensibly. And online payments are being made, and collected, automatically – helping to maximise your financial health.

Job management and productivity

Planning and running your operations and project work can be tough. But with software project management and workflow apps connected up to your central system, you’re always on top of the workload and resourcing. Talk to us about which app would work in your business. 

Digital marketing and social media

Most consumers and business customers will begin a search for products/services online. So having a good website, a bold online presence and the right social media channels in place is vital for your sales and marketing strategy. By positioning your brand in the digital space, you make yourself relevant, easy to find and connected to your ideal customer base.

If you’re planning a digital transformation process for your small business, come and talk to us. We’ll help you review your systems and processes, identify your key business needs and recommend the software tools and apps that will build your ideal digital system.

Get in touch to start embracing the digital future.

Automation can ease your business workload

Small and medium-sized businesses are spending on average 120 hours a year on admin tasks, according to recent research into productivity at UK SMBs.

If your people are spending 120 hours wading through tedious and unproductive admin, that’s bad for the business and for your overall efficiency. Fortunately, technology and software automation can go a long way towards automating the low-level admin tasks.

Better productivity through automation

Automation is an important way to ease your business workload, with a host of different business apps and cloud solutions offering ways to automate your admin.

With ‘smart business tools’ increasing in number and choice, software is utilising automation algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and cognitive solutions to help remove the mundane admin tasks from your workflows.

Core processes that will benefit from automation include:

Automated bookkeeping

Just take a photo of your receipts, expenses and invoices and ‘optical character recognition’ (OCR) technology will digitise the output and pull it through into your accounts software. No data entry, no human error and no lost receipts! We can do the rest to ensure your records are accurate.

Automated credit control 

Chasing up debts and late-paying customers takes time. Automated credit control apps track your debtor numbers and automatically sends out customised chaser emails as soon as an invoice is late. This reduces your credit control time, speeds up cash collection and cuts your aged debtor figure.

Automated payment collection

The easier it is to pay you, the faster your customers will pay. Automated card payments and cloud-based Direct Debit solutions allow you to automatically take payment from a customer as soon as an invoice is due. Some solutions will even automate the invoice matching and bank reconciliation process.

Automated reporting and forecasting 

The better your reporting and business intelligence, the easier it is to make informed decisions about your company strategy. Accounting platforms and fintech tools now offer automatic, real-time reporting and forecasting, giving you access to the important numbers and metrics, fast.

Automated digital marketing

Digital marketing is key to raising your brand’s profile. Marketing platforms offer important time-saving ways to schedule and post social media content, or email automation that sends a pre-programmed cadence of emails to specific target audiences within your wider customer base.

Talk to us about embracing the power of automation

If your admin is starting to hold you back, come and talk to us about how automation can pick up some of the heavy lifting as well as giving you the metrics you need for decision making. We can review you business processes and identify the automation opportunities, helping you choose the best apps to drive your business efficiently.

Contact us to discuss your automation opportunities. 

Making data meaningful for your business

In today’s world the fast pace of business requires business owners to be able to react quickly to conditions.

This means having the ability to compile, analyse and act on data is increasingly important. Having access to your business data allows you to forecast and potentially identify trends and patterns before they emerge.

So, what is data?

When it comes to business, data includes the facts and figures that your business processes every day.

Over time, your business will obtain data.

For example, if your business is already using cloud software for bookkeeping and accounting, payroll, project management or CRM (customer relationship management), you likely have access to a goldmine of data. And that data gives you valuable insight into your sales, revenue and expenses, profit, payroll, and other business details that can help you make smart business decisions.

If you aren’t recording accurate data for your business, you can only rely on gut feel and assumptions about your business’ past performance to inform and guide your future business decisions.

It’s important to remember that your business data only becomes meaningful when it has context, relevance and purpose.

Data is only powerful if there is context

You want your data to be able to provide insight into answering these questions:

• What is your business goals?
• What is happening in the business now?
• What has influenced the past?

Is your data relevant?

With all the tools available for data collection it’s important to focus on what’s relevant to your decision making.

Make sure you know what data is necessary rather than what’s nice to have.

• Are your financials up-to-date?
• Are the right systems and processes in use for different parts of your business?
• Are your cloud systems set up correctly (and being used correctly)?

The worst thing you can do is to attempt to analyse irrelevant data and then make business decisions based on it! Make sure you’re collecting and looking at the data that’s relevant for your business.

Your data needs to have a purpose

Don’t forget what you’re collecting your business data for.

Focus on what truly matters and build from there.

• What data/numbers/information determines success for you?
• What do you want to understand most about your business?

If you want help with setting up and understanding your data, so you can forecast and make better, informed business decisions, get in touch.

We can accumulate, analyse, report and advise on your data; or show you the tools to use.