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Tips To Avoid A Cash Crunch: 3 Ideas For Cash Flow Management

Tips To Avoid A Cash Crunch: 3 Ideas For Cash Flow Management

Cash flow is an important element of any small business. To effectively manage your cash flow, you need to be aware of all the aspects that can affect it and how they impact your business. The best way to achieve this is by understanding what might cause fluctuations in cash flow and coming up with solutions ahead of time for each negative event so as not to be caught off guard if one occurs. This article will discuss some common factors that may reduce or increase your company’s cash flow and provide tips on how to handle crunches when they arise.

What is Cash Flow?

In quite simple terms, cash flow is the money flowing in and out of your business each month. Small businesses need to strike a balance between accounts payable and accounts receivable to ensure that more money comes in than goes out each month. Although cash flow is related to net income, they have some key differences. 

Net income refers to the earnings of a business during a period after considering all expenses incurred during the period. Net income includes sales recognized but not collected until subsequent months. In addition, net income likely includes a monthly depreciation charge which is a non-cash item. These are important to consider when comparing net income to your operating cash flow.

Why is Cash Flow Important?

Understanding how your business generates and uses cash can help you better navigate the growth of your company. Analyzing your cash flow helps you see how well your business is performing and how much liquidity your business has. 

Having cash on hand puts you in a better financial position, adds stability, and gives you better purchasing power. Your cash flow determines how quickly you can expand your business. Additionally, having positive cash flow that leads to a surplus makes you a worthwhile investment for banks or investors. 

maximize cash flow

Tips for Boosting Your Business’ Cash Flow

There are so many things you can do to keep your business running smoothly.

You should have a plan for every day; when the unexpected happens, you should be able to react. There are three areas to focus on for boosting cash flow.

Increase Revenues

  • Keep an eye on customer retention rates, customers are the backbone of any business, and if you have a low customer retention rate, it is time to look at what is going on. Customers are the lifeblood of any company. They provide the revenue that funds your business, and they keep you in business. 
  • Find out what is lacking in the market and offer new products and categories to augment your current offerings. You may be able to charge a higher price for new or improving on existing items.

Decrease Expenses

  • Reach out to new suppliers or renegotiate prices with an existing vendor. Even offering to pay early could result in getting a small discount, which is almost always worth taking.
  • Find ways to automate, or even outsource, parts of your operations. 
  • Find less expensive suppliers that have nothing to do with the product you sell. You do not want to sacrifice product quality for a lower price since this affects your image and reputation in the market. Focus on costs such as office supplies or a less expensive insurance provider. 

Operational Efficiency

  • Be open about what your cash flow is like with your team. They will need to know what is going on if cash flow is already tight or if it becomes tight. They can help your business quickly find ways to cut expenses or reinvest profits into projects with high rates of return.
  • Find ways to increase your return on assets. Smart business owners track their return on assets because it reveals how effectively you are investing in your business.
  • Manage inventories through buying more efficiently or increasing inventory turnover. When you buy efficiently your customer is the focal point, which makes it easier to make more sales.

 

An interesting observation by the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto helps explain how best to manage cash flow. He noticed that 80 percent of the land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population. He further noticed that it happened in nature in that 80 percent of the peas in his garden were produced from 20 percent of the pods.

What does this have to do with cash flow management? Look at your business: it is likely that the Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is in play. Do 80 percent of your sales come from 20 percent of you customers? If so, it might make sense to cut out some of your more high-maintenance, low profitability clients. Your ratios may be different but understanding roughly 80 percent of an output results from almost 20 percent of an input gives you a competitive advantage on where to look to focus your effort and resources. 

By keeping an eye on your expenses, income, and operational efficiency you can predict when you might need a little extra cash coming in or going out. You can even use a budgeting tool to help with this process. You will see how much money is coming in each month and where all the money is going out each month, so it is easy for you to make changes if needed.

What are the differences between a Bookkeeper, a Management Accountant, and a Tax Accountant?

What are the differences between a Bookkeeper, a Management Accountant, and a Tax Accountant?

Many of our clients ask us why we talk about bookkeepers, management accountants, and tax accountants, and not just accountants.

A bookkeeper keeps track of all your daily financial transactions and assists in keeping your business organized. Receiving and paying bills, issuing invoices, categorizing expenses, taking inventory, and reconciling bank accounts are some of the daily and weekly tasks that form the core of a bookkeeper’s responsibility.

A management accountant leads the effort to provide insight into your business’s financial performance. Drafting budgets, tracking actual performance against budget, reconciling balance sheets creating cash flow forecasts, and performing inventory costings are among the duties of a management accountant to assist you in making decisions for your business.

A tax accountant provides a very specific service to calculate your taxes, minimize your chance of an audit, and guide your strategy, particularly when acquiring or selling a business or investing in assets, to minimize your potential tax liabilities.

Read About Protea Bookkeeping Services

Bookkeeping is More Than Just Crunching Numbers

While bookkeepers do a fair amount of data entry and receipt tracking, the heart of the process is labeling expenses, indicating which suppliers you paid and how much, as well as keeping a record of receipts. Your bookkeepers may also do double duty in payroll and work to prepare and issue invoices.

Even though bookkeeping work can be notably detailed, bookkeepers can be the foundation of surviving an audit. Business deductions are a huge IRS tax audit trigger. They set off alarms, which can be silenced with legal and meticulous record keeping.

What a Tax Accountant Does

Accountants perform a variety of accounting functions and are typically certified by national and professional associations. Accountants must a have a four-year college degree in accountancy. And additionally, depending on their specialty, they may have to spend up to a year earning a certification in their home state.

Tax accountants provide specialized tax advice. They calculate tax liabilities and provide strategies for legally lowering their clients’ tax liability. Business tax accountants typically have advanced degrees and help their clients with high-level strategic financial decisions.  Senior-level tax accountants take more of a theoretical approach to their clients’ overall tax strategy, helping with business plans, individual financial plans—trusts, etc.—with the goal of taking full advantage of the tax code.

What does your business need: a Bookkeeper, a Management Accountant or a Tax Accountant?

In our opinion, small businesses such as wineries need all three, and should seek specialists in each field.  Tax Accountants and Management Accountants can do your bookkeeping, but they are over-qualified, and you would be paying too much, as bookkeepers are the least expensive.  However, bookkeepers need oversight, and a good management accountant can oversee and check a bookkeeper’s work to ensure accuracy, and then provide additional insight (that a bookkeeper isn’t trained to furnish) into your business to help you make better financial decisions.

Tax accountants are typically more expensive than management accountants, and their focus is on creating an accurate tax return that will minimize your tax liabilities and risk of an audit.  They are more focused on providing an accurate report to the government than on developing recommendations for you to operate your business more efficiently.  Management accountants are focused on helping you operate your business.

Protea Financial is Your Outsourced Bookkeeping and Management Accounting Services

We match our solutions to the needs of the customer. Do your bookkeepers need extra help during end-of-year closeout?  Is your tax accountant asking you to assemble better financials in order to reduce the time they have to spend preparing your return?

Protea Financial can support you with everything from bookkeeping services, order processing and inventory tracking to handling management accounts and tax schedules in order to support your tax accountant prepare your year-end financial statements. Protea’s goal is to provide, at costs below the market average, timely, accurate, and high-quality financial information on which a business can act.

We can work with you to provide an evaluation and find the best solution for your business.