Managing projects in a remote team

We’re living in a world where remote and hybrid working are now the norm.

Driven by lockdowns and the pandemic, businesses have been forced to adopt a ‘working from home’ approach. And this ability to work remotely has driven productivity and efficiency for some companies but can create its own challenges.

Designing your workflows for remote working

When a whole team, or even a percentage of a team, are no longer sitting in the same office space, there are some very specific considerations to bear in mind. How do they access the systems they need? Where is all the company and customer data stored? How can people collaborate? What’s the best way to communicate?

If you’re going to make it easy to manage a project with a remote or hybrid team, you absolutely need to think through these questions and come up with some practical answers.

For example:

Video-based meetings and project kick-offs

The obvious problem of not being in the same room is that the project team can’t see or hear each other. 

And over the course of the pandemic, we’ve seen video meetings and platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams come into their own. Having your kick-off meeting and regular team catch-ups via video calls helps everyone to feel involved, and helps to create more of a ‘team spirit’ between a group of people who may be hundreds, or even thousands, of miles apart.

Capturing actions and briefs

During meetings, you need good ways of taking down notes, capturing actions or summarising what’s been discussed with the client or the team. Using a cloud-based document system, like Microsoft 365, Google Docs or Evernote allows you to capture these ideas as rough notes. Or you could use an AI transcription tool, like Otter.ai, to transcribe the audio from the meeting as it happens and provide you with a full written breakdown of the call.

Job management and tracking tools

Once the project is underway, it’s important to monitor progress, record which tasks have been completed and stay in control of a disparate group of people all working in different places.

There are many project management tools for tracking the progress of a project and keeping everyone on top of things. When these tools are cloud-based, everyone has access 24/7 from any internet-enabled location, so that makes it far easier for everyone to be kept in the loop – and for people managers to see how each person is tracking.

We specialise in this space to support the implementation of these tools, so talk to us about your options. 

Collaborating together as a team

Working together from a distance is another hurdle for a dispersed team to overcome. But with cloud-based collaboration tools, like Monday, Slack or Teams, you can quickly create an online space for the team to share documents, have online chats, upload different document versions and generally boost the collaborative process.

The easier you make it to communicate and share files/info, the fewer challenges you’ll face as the project develops.

Integrating project finances with your accounts

Whatever the project, there are going to be certain costs, expenses and budgetary considerations to cope with. And staying in control of that with a team of remote workers can be a challenge – both for the project manager and the company’s finance team.

The answer is to use a project management tool that integrates with your main cloud accounting software. Many of the top project management and invoicing solutions can connect directly to platforms such as Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB or Sage.

Apps like DiviPay or Pleo also provide ways to manage your remote team expenses when employees are making ad hoc payments, racking up project expenses or have control over their own budgets etc.

Again, we specialise in this space to support the implementation of these tools, so talk to us about your options. 

As the benefits and flexibility of remote working become more widely felt, we’re likely to see even more projects being run remotely – with employees no longer clustered in the same office 5 days per week. So, if you want to keep your competitive advantage, you need to be ready.

ATO Line of credit ending

As new reporting powers come into play, businesses are being warned against using the ATO as an alternative line of credit.

Debt Reporting Powers

In 2019, the ATO was afforded new debt reporting powers. While this took a backseat to the Covid-19 pandemic, the ATO is now cracking down on outstanding tax debt. 

Businesses without a payment plan, that are more than 90 days in arrears, and who owe more than $100,000 in tax are more likely to be reported to credit agencies by the ATO.

Impact on credit rating

In the past, business owners have sometimes used the ATO like a ‘line of credit’ by not paying their ATO commitments on time.

Taking this road is much more likely to have an adverse impact on your credit ratings and credit insurance limits. This, in turn, makes it more difficult to maintain or extend credit terms with suppliers.

Therefore, it's important to maintain a high level of communication with your creditors. 

Staying on the front foot

As business owners, if you owe tax, it's vital that you stay on the front foot with this ATO crackdown. We suggest you seek the advice of your BAS agent.

First Class Accounts Ovens and Murray, as your BAS Agent, are able to advocate on your behalf to deal with the ATO.

As Busy01 Consulting, we can also to assist with:

• preparing a business plan
• management advice
• cash-flow planning and projection
• systems development
• business expansion
• budget development
• trading-structure planning.

Get in touch to discuss which options are best for your business. 

Direct Debits and Online Payments

Do You Have Direct Debits and Online Payments Set Up for Your Business?

Making it easy for your customers to pay you is vital to business success. Getting direct debits and alternative payment methods linked to your business is so easy these days there's no excuse not to give your customers multiple ways of making payment.

Many service-based businesses choose direct debit arrangements with their clients to avoid late payment. If you’re often chasing overdue payments, consider implementing direct debit arrangements to reduce your administration time.

If you’re already using online accounting software, check the add-on solutions and choose one that integrates with your accounts. This means that the payment platform information feeds directly into your accounting software to be easily matched to customer transactions.

Make it Easy

You probably already have bank transfer information set up, but adding several other methods such as PayPal, debit cards, and credit cards allows customers to choose the method most convenient for them at the time. Many customers appreciate the automation and simplicity of direct debits.

Make sure your payment terms and conditions are clear on your website and invoices and don't forget to include all your chosen payment methods for customers!

Worried About Costly Fees?

You have the option to choose whether you will absorb the cost of the payment gateway processing fees or whether you will add the cost to your invoice and charge the clients extra. Your accounting software will then allocate the funds accordingly to invoice payment and fees received.

Better Transaction Recording

When you integrate direct debits and online payment methods with your accounting system, you dramatically reduce errors in recording customer payments – which means less time spent on your accounts!

Not Sure Where to Start?

If you’d like to make it easier for customers to pay you, talk to us about which solutions are best for your business. We can discuss which platforms have the best and most secure integrations with the accounting software you use.

We’ll help streamline your payment systems.

Does your business have a disaster recovery plan? 

It’s important to have a watertight plan for overcoming any potential natural disasters

With extreme weather events on the rise and climate change becoming an increasing threat, it's never been more important for your business to have a disaster recovery plan in place.

Weather is becoming more severe, more unpredictable and more destructive over time. With shops and offices in some locations getting flooded out, shaken by earthquakes or threatened by wildfires, you need to know that your company can:

1. Survive an extreme weather threat
2. Set up the business in a secondary location, if the need arises

Your disaster recovery plan (DRP) is your detailed plan for how to achieve this, and is an important element of your company’s wider business continuity strategy.

The increased threat of extreme weather conditions

When you’ve invested considerable time, effort and money in setting up a business, the last thing you want is an unpredictable threat wiping out this investment.

However, if your company runs from bricks-and-mortar premises, there’s always the potential for extreme weather to have an impact on your operational capabilities. The recent severe flooding in Europe has wreaked havoc in many small towns, wiping out high streets and dumping tonnes of filthy river water into business premises, shops and homes alike.

As a business owner, the question you have to ask yourself is

‘What would I do if this happened to my business?’

Getting your business back up and running

When you sit down to complete a standard SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, it’s unlikely that you’ll previously have included extreme weather as a major element in your list of threats. But the times are changing, and the potential for disaster has to move up your agenda as a matter of urgency.

To keep your business prepared and ready, you should ask yourself a few specific questions.

These will include:

Do you have a disaster recovery plan? 

Does the business have any kind of disaster recovery plan (DRP) in place at present?

You may well have a business continuity strategy of some sort, but do you have a specific plan if fire, flood, earthquakes or other natural forces directly threaten your business premises? If not, you need to create one.

How does your plan align with your business continuity strategy? 

Business continuity is all about ensuring that your company can remain operational and trading. So your DRP should be a significant part of this continuity strategy.

Being wiped out by a flood may have once seemed like a Hollywood disaster movie scenario. Now it’s an event that’s all too possible – and something you need to have prepared for.

Is anyone in charge in the event of a disaster? 

Leadership and clear advice during a time of disaster are essential. So, in the event of an extreme weather event affecting your premises, who will be in charge? Is this the CEO or MDs job? The COO? Or maybe this will be a secondary role for another employee, who has been trained up and knows how to lead the response.

Make sure you know who to contact and their role.

Are your systems and databases in the cloud? 

In today's digital world, many companies will have based their IT and communications infrastructure around cloud technology.

Being a cloud-based business is incredibly valuable in the event of a disaster, allowing you to engage a ‘disaster recovery as a service’ (DraaS) process that gets all your business systems up and running from cloud backups and off-site servers.

Talk to us about cloud based apps and platforms for your business.

Can you team work remotely? 

Another benefit of being cloud-based is that employees can work remotely from any location.

So, if your office is flooded out, your team can log in from home and can continue to work. If you’re still relying on desktop applications via an office-based server and network, this just isn’t possible.

Offering remote working isn’t just good for your staff, it could be a business critical decision.

Do you have access to any alternative workspaces? 

Depending on the business property you own, you may have access to alternative offices or workspaces.

When one location is affected by extreme weather, would an alternative location be able to take on your displaced staff and continue working? Look at how feasible it is to have a plan for moving teams to alternative locations. And, if possible, making as much use of remote working as possible.

No-one believes they will be the victim of a disaster...until it happens to them.

No-one can fully predict how extreme weather and natural disasters will come to affect the planet over the coming years and decades. But the risk of a freak event impacting your business is growing.

Its worth putting some time aside now to think about the practicalities of setting up a disaster recovery plan.

Keeping debt low

Credit control: Having a large amount of debt in your business is bad for cashflow, weakens your overall financial health and brings down your credit score as a business.

So when customers don’t pay on time, that ‘aged debt’ is bad news for your finances. Aged debt can begin to stack up, adding to your liabilities and reducing the health of your overall balance sheet. So, it’s important to tackle late payment head on.

Get effective with your credit control

Being proactive with your debt management helps you speed up payment, reduce your debtor days and rein in your overall debt as a business

To improve the efficiency of your credit control:

• Make your payment terms clear – state your payment terms on all invoices and create a policy that’s part of the terms & conditions that customers sign up to.
• Run regular debtor reports – check your list of late invoices to see which customers are the late payers, and where the big debts are that need to be collected.
• Be proactive in chasing late payment – don’t be shy about asking a customer to pay their bill. Set up notifications and schedules to remind yourself to chase late-payers.
• Automate your credit control tasks – cloud accounting platforms have built-in tools or automated credit control integrations that can automatically chase your late-paying customers as soon as an invoice is overdue.

Talk to us about enhancing your credit control

If late payment and aged debt is weighing heavily on your balance sheet, we’ll help you set up the debtor reports and credit control processes needed to reduce this debt.

Get in touch to improve your credit control.

Cost of Sales Affecting Gross Profit

Do you know how much it costs you to produce each product or service in your range?

The better you can understand this cost of sales – or cost of goods sold (COGS), as it’s more commonly known – the more ability you have to control your company’s profitability. When you know your COGS, you can set the right price point, control your profit margins and ensure that you’re maximising your gross profit.

But to do this, you need to understand COGS and how it impacts on your financial management.

Understanding your Cost of Sales

To take one of your company’s products or services from inception to delivery, you will incur a number of costs.

For example, if you’re a manufacturing business, these costs might include buying in raw materials, direct labour costs, the overheads for running the machinery in your factory, the costs of delivering the products and the sales and marketing expenses needed to sell the product to your target customers.

For you to manufacture a finished product and to generate a sale, all these costs are a necessary part of the process. They’re the direct costs of producing your goods for sale.

You calculate your COGS number for the period by looking at the value of your opening stock (or inventory), adding the cost you’ve incurred to produce the goods and then subtracting the value of the closing stock balance.

The COGS formula looks like this:

Opening Stock + Purchases - Closing Stock = COGS

So, if you started with an inventory of $10,000, this is how you’d calculate your COGS:

• Opening Stock: $10,000
• Purchases: $25,000
• Closing Stock: $8,000
• COGS: $27,000

Reducing your COGS to boost gross profits

The more sales you make at a given price, the higher your revenue (income) will be. Deducting your COGS number from your revenue figure gives you your gross profit – and gross profit is a key metric for tracking the health and profitability of your business.

A high COGS number reduces the size of your profit margin. And, in turn, a small margin will start to have a negative impact on your gross profit. Being able to control and manage your COGS, and its impact on your gross profit, is a vital skill for any product-based business.

Here are some ideas for improving the profit impact of your COGS:

Reduce your supplier costs

If you can reduce the size of the purchases made to produce your goods, that means less expenditure and less impact on your profit margins. Try shopping around for cheaper suppliers, or negotiating better prices with your existing suppliers to bring down costs.

Streamline your production process

The more complex your production process is, the more overheads and production expenses there will be. Taking a lean approach helps you to continually evolve your processes and remove the extraneous elements – cutting costs while still delivering a quality product.

Increase your prices to boost your margins

If your COGS number is eating into your profit margin, one way to resolve this is to increase your price point. This will help to increase income and boost your margin but does require caution. If prices get too high, this can damage existing customer relationships and make you uncompetitive in the market – so think carefully about any price increases before taking action.

Talk to us about improving your gross profit.

If you want to boost your gross profit and get COGS under control, come and have a chat with us. We’ll look over your expenses and overheads, and will look for the opportunities to reduce your goods-related purchases and push for a better profit margin on your products.

Do you have a business plan?

As we continue to face challenging times, to make a success of your business you’re going to need a robust business plan.

With a one-page business plan behind you, your company has a real sense of strategic direction and a set of core goals to refer to and track against.

But what are the key elements to include in your one-pager business plan?

We’ve listed some of the foundational areas to cover, so there’s real purpose behind your business.

What to include in your business plan

Lots of online resources will suggest that a business plan is an easy document to create, but a good plan will take time and plenty of thinking to get right.

As business advisers, we’ll help you put together a plan that gives you a clear strategy for the next six months and beyond, with measurable goals to include in your plan. The resulting document will help give you clarity on your direction, and where to invest time and money.

A business plan will also be an essential document if you are looking for investors or external funding. Any loan providers or private investors will want to assess the risk in your business, your cashflow position and the underlying profitability of the enterprise – so bear this all in mind when outlining the financial details of your plan.

If you haven't written a plan before, a template is useful.

Start with the following headings:

Business description

Your business description should include a mission statement, your key goals and your objectives as an enterprise. A good mission statement explains:

1. what you do
2. why you do it
3. who you do it for.

It should be short and to the point and be used to inspire your marketing and drive the everyday internal running, ethos and tactics of your business operations and team thinking.

Business profile

A profile section tells me how long you’ve been in business, the specialty products or service niches that you focus on, and the key strengths of the company. It will also outline your business strategy and how you aim to achieve your targets, increase your customer base and grow the business over time.

Business environment

This section sets out the environment that you trade in as a business. So you should outline things like the key trends in your industry, your close competitors in the market, and the size of your current customer base. You can also include any research or market research you’ve compiled regarding your intended market, industries and customers, to give your plan some factual foundations.

Business strategy

A SWOT analysis demonstrates the strengths, opportunities, weaknesses and threats in the business, allowing you to refine your business strategy and maximise your success. Identifying your key strengths and opportunities helps you to focus your efforts and resources in the most productive areas. And knowing your weaknesses and threats helps you look for areas of improvement, and where you may need to safeguard the company against specific risks, threats and competitors.

Financials

Your financials section sets out the basic financial drivers of the business idea. For new businesses, this will mean outlining your projected expenses, budgets, sales targets and profitability projections etc. For existing businesses, you can include your profit and loss, balance sheet, sales trends and projected budgets etc. Cashflow and revenue forecasts will also be essential if you’re approaching lenders.

Talk to us about creating your one-page business plan

We’ll help you create a tailored business plan, to guide you through the threats and opportunities that lie ahead, with solid financial management for the next stage in your growth.

Do you feel like a slave to your business?

Feeling like a slave to your business implies the loss of control; thinking that you need to be available to your customers 24/7 and that your team can't cope without you.

It can also imply a victim mentality - that this is just what it's like to be a business owner and that it's not something you can change. Maybe Covid had a huge impact on your business and you're playing catch up.

There are lots of reasons why you feel like a slave to your business. In other words, lots of excuses.

The OARBED behaviour model tells us we must act above the line; taking Ownership, Accountability and Responsibility for our actions and the choices we make. Feeling like a slave to your business is a choice.

So, what can you do to stop feeling this way?

How can you get back in control of your business

First, review and update your processes. If customers are contacting you at all hours, put in place a timeframe for responding, e.g. within 24 hour hours, and communicate this with your customers. If cashflow is an issue, review your payment terms and ensure they're being enforced.

Next, if you don't feel like you can trust your team to run your business without you, establish why this is.

Do they need more training and support?

Have you given them the opportunity to step up and take on more responsibility?

Do you need to take on more team members or outsource some tasks?

Whatever your reasons - or excuses - are for feeling like a slave to your business, now is the time to reflect on what it is you wanted your business to deliver to you.

Set goals for what you want your business and personal life to look like in 12 months.

Break these down into 90 day goals and actions to achieve those goals.

Take ownership, accountability and responsibility for regaining control of your business.

Consider the following questions

• Do you need to start going home on time every night?
• Do you need to stop accepting work from people who don’t respect your payment terms?
• Do you need to block out calendar time to respect your health and wellbeing?
• Do you need to implement 10 strategies to grow your cashflow?
• Do you need to train and empower your team to take on more responsibility?
• Do you need more time to plan?

No more excuses - it’s your business, you make the rules, choose not to be a slave!

We can help you be the master of your business - get in touch to find out how.

"Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire."
Arnold Glasgow