Thursday 22 December 2011

Money Gets Everywhere

A lot of people struggle with money. Some of them go into business and struggle with money there too.
One thing you must never do is to shove all your bills unopened behind the clock, as it were. The money gets everywhere in business. It’s the measure of how you are doing, how big you can be and a stream of business consciousness. It is the lowest common denominator for all business.
If you do struggle with money there are some things you can do to get to grips with it. Ultimately you can get someone else to look after your business for you but that is undesirable in many ways. You must retain an overview even if you have a bookkeeper for example. Above that the pricing, the investments, the procurements are all down to your day to day management anyway.
Business Tips 
Some straight forward procedures will take away the mystery, the time wasting and the disasters. Some simple ones for micro businesses are offered below but the implementation is up to you and differs from business to business depending on the number of people involved and the scale of activities.
  • ·         Have on line banking
  • ·         Look at every morning to confirm what is happening
  • ·         Have a list of invoices, with a tick box for sent, paid, chased with the dates.
  • ·         Have a set date or method of getting your invoices sent off
  • ·         Have a set date to chase any outstanding
  • ·         Make sure money is cleared at the Bank before you pay against it
  • ·         Keep all your receipts in a tidy file
  • ·         Keep a note of your mileage in your diary as you go along. Use the trip meter
  • ·         Make sure you have a system for pricing and stick to it

In short just be bothered to keep an eye on it all.
For larger SME businesses the idea is the same but the systems need to be more organised. Even so they do not need to be complicated . Do not be fooled into buying some complicated bookkeeping software that you will struggle to keep up with. I see so many businesses unable to extract reports and information from their computerised bookkeeping I have to wonder if they would be better off with a hand written chart or two.

Bob Shepherd Associates has a background in business money. It's not straight forward and there is no reason why you should already be experienced in dealing with it. There is however every reason why you should pay it attention. 

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