Barkley Associates

Budgeting gives a detailed understanding of the profit dynamics and financial structure of your business and helps you anticipate changes in the future. Budgeting makes you focus on things you must develop to enhance profit and gets you ready for the period to come. A thorough profit budget indicates what balances you can expect in your cash flow.

The resulting cash flow forecast from your budget will inform you of your expected cash balances in the future from which you can tell what you can or can’t deploy in increasing the size of your business.

The higher the cash flow from profit the more flexibility you have when it comes to [changes in the economic climate. The best way to track how you are doing against your budget is to use the cash flow forecast reporting tools found in all good small business accounting software .

Creating more profit does not automatically create a better cashflow . Do not be deceived by this point

You have to continually track and immediately study any variance in your actual cash flow from profit. Any changes from what you expected] you discover should be analysed to work out if you have an opportunity or a problem.

The great thing about modern small business accounting software is it often allows you to drill down through summary numbers in the reports to uncover the detail.

All expenses are detrimental to cash flow and as a general rule more sales means inflated expenses and therefore higher cash burn for a period as the organisation consumes more resources to support the increase in revenue.

You should enter all expenses and sales activity into your small business management software as soon as they occur so as you can report an accurate forecast and make corrections or adjustments in line with your budget.

Good businesses religiously track and measure their cash flow forecasts against their budgets and there is simply no excuse for not doing this any other approach is irresponsible, dangerous and eventually fatal.

All the best with your business and the future.

Fewer than 50% of businesses survive beyond five years. If you closely examine government figures you will see the evidence

The statisticians most obvious reason for death is the unfortunate ones eventually ran out of cash. This lack of detail is not helpful and so I decided to track down individuals directly and indirectly connected with failed businesses to see if I could determine the details, establish any common reasons for failure and publish them on the internet in the hope that my insights would help others avoid a similar fate. I uncovered eight consistent reasons for business death. Here are three of them:

No Vision, mission or strategy

“If you have not worked out where you are going then how are you going to get there?” You have to have a clear picture of what you want to achieve and how life will be for your business if you achieve it. To achieve anything you it is essential to have a strategy. Strategy can be likened to a route map it tells you how to get there. It’s a structured list of activities. To make a strategy work you have to create a business plan that not only contains the key actions and milestones but can used to measure business performance against. A key tool for monitoring business perfomance is the sales forecast.

Lack of a system for marketing or sales

Marketing is about finding markets and trying out strategies to position your offering in the minds of prospects and drawing them into your sales funnel. Sales is about engaging the prospect and getting them to buy your product or service. Marketing is a process of measuring and improvement of the methods you employ to attract prospects. selling is the process of acquiring leads, forecasting sales and closing business. In successful businesses a decent marketing and sales system is consistently supported by a well designed sales forecasting software system. Such a system gives you the ability to track and measure what is happening in the sales and marketing processes. These insights arederived from reports produced by the system which can then be used to compare what was planned with what actually happened. In summary what gets measured gets improved or discontinued. This is the critical formula for success.

Lack a system to monetise their captive customer base

There is a well known phrase that eighty percent of your sales should come from 20% of your customers. Your job is to achieve or surpass this figure. Customers who have previously made purchases from you are simpler and more cost effective to reach than prospects that have not. A combination of effective web based crm software and sales forecasting software should give you the knowledge of recent activity and allow you to discover opportunities in your current customer base.

Often it is hard to know what makes good chartered accountants, but there are some qualities that a good accountant needs to have, such as being able to establish a rapport with clients and establish a trusting relationship. This article looks at different ways to find a good accountant who can help clients to save money!

Some think they can save money by not having an account. But times have changed!  Accountants are no longer exceptionally expensive and most accountants will say that they save their clients money, rather than costing their clients money. So how do you go about finding a good accountant?

Well there are various ways to find a good accountant and when you find a good accountant, they will be the right person for you to use.

Many people simply look in the local telephone book or do a quick Internet search, although many people think that word of mouth is the best way to find a good accountant.  If you know someone who uses an accountant then ask them who they use and get the contact details.

But you need to ensure that you feel comfortable with the Accountant in North Wales that you choose.  When you ring up an accountant most of them will have a chat on the phone or they will invite you in for a quick chat. This chat or meeting provides you with the opportunity to see whether or not you trust them and feel comfortable with them.Its very important for you to work with an accountant to secure your money and pay the right amount of tax. 

Ask as many questions as you can. This can help you to get to know the accountant and help you understand them a little.

If you do ask a couple of people for a recommendation but when you talk to the accountant you do not like them or feel comfortable with them, don’t give up, you will find someone, just keep asking around.

There are some companies that will provide you with an accountancy service via the Internet, but these are somewhat faceless and you can feel as if you are never talking to the same person twice, so you don’t get a personalised service, but on the other hand, such services are exceptionally good value for money, so if money is tight, then perhaps you should think about using an Internet service.

But whatever kind of accountant you use, make sure that you feel comfortable and you are able to communicate with them, so that you can maximise your experience of this professional relationship and hopefully save yourself some money as well!

Gathering the basic sales forecasting information you must have

Every business should have a sales forecasting process. Sales forecasting should receive just as much attention as cash flow management. Sales are the life blood of any business as cash is the oxygen supply. The cash flow and sales forecast reports are inextricably linked. The adoption of good sales forecasting software and a well enforced sales forecasting policy can make an big difference to the health and performance of any business.

Key inputs

There are three key inputs or factors to consider when creating a sales forecast. The sales person, the customer and the product. Good sales forecasting software enables you to report on these inputs and give you a clear picture of the state of your sales pipeline and what is and isn’t going to come in when.

1. Getting sales people to gather accurate sales forecasting information.

Sales people vary in their levels of skills, experience and knowledge of your target market or industry. But with a small amount of training, encouragement and discipline they can be made to submit accurate sales forecasts. Drill the questions that you need answers to into your salespeople and make sure as the undertake the sales process that they are talking to the right people at the right time and posing the right questions in the right way. Therefore the first discipline sales people should have drilled into them is planning. It’s vital that every customer meeting or call is carefully planned. The plan should contain what information is needed and what questions will be asked in what order. Their call plan should be recorded in the sales forecasting software for later review. There are still sales people in this world who don’t practise the art of writing out their questions before attending a call and writing down the answers they receive.

2. Gathering Customer information

Keeping detailed information about the customer’s organisation, the market they operate in and the progress they are making is really useful when it comes to assessing the basis for the salespersons sales forecast assumptions

A good example of this is the customers credit rating. Customer records should be stored and available in the sales forecasting software. Therefore every sales person should develop a habit of finding out as much as they can that is in the public domain about the customer. Naturally this information is good content for conversation when the sales person interacts with the customer. It will always lead to questions and most customers are impressed by sales people who appear to have a genuine interest or good working knowledge of their customers. Remember the art of the sale is about solving the customer’s problem. The more problems you can spot in your customer’s business, the more creative you will become and the more you might sell if what you have can address these problems.

3. Educating the Customer

This is where the third factor, the product comes into play. The easiest way to sell a product or a service is to make sure your customer is educated as much as is possible about what you do. I am not talking here about thrusting brochures into their hands. Here I would recommend using the timeless art of the story. Story tellers who tell a good story will always get our attentions. Stories about how other customers have uses your products and services to solve their problems are invaluable. Forget testimony or case study, think stories. These terms are tired and worn. You will get so much more information back from a customer if you tell detailed and carefully woven stories as they paint good pictures of the possible outcomes of using your product or service.

All of this information rigourously entered by all into a good sales forecasting software system should give you the knowledge to make better decisions and avoid errors of judgement in cash management.

Checks are vital components that most businesses can’t go on without. Like a mirror, your check reflects the type of business that you have. Checks are also important in managing your personal finances more effectively and efficiently. It is therefore important to come up with enticing and interesting features for your business checks, personal checks, and a lot more.

With our wide selection of checks online, you get a high quality design for your business or personal checks at a relatively low price. You don’t have to shell out too much cash for your checks. You might even end up over satisfied with all the crazy things you could do with these checks.

Purchasing checks online is one way of saving a substantial amount of time, effort, and money. With the aid of your keyboard and a few clicks, you are already on your way towards your personalized checks perfect for your needs.

Checks nowadays are more customizable than ever. Either you suggest special lettering, upload a photo or business logo, or even customize with stubs and vouchers, you can quickly gain yourself with reliable checks for your business and personal needs. You can choose any design that you want at a conveniently low price with almost anything that you can have in your mind. Buying checks online is now fast becoming a new trend on every businessman and to those who are very keen in effectively managing their business and personal finances.

Order checks bought online are very much lower in price compared to bank check with the same quality that you need for your checks. Aside from that, there’s also no need for long line ups and messy paperwork in the bank when you are purchasing your checks at the comfort of your home. Transacting online at home is a quick, easy, and far better alternative to provide yourself with checks that will precisely meet your interest, needs, and personality.

Integrity and flexibility of your business are assured of a significant progress with the aid of your personalized checks. With a wide selection of traditional and designer styles, you are ensured of a fun way in coming up with your checks that will best emphasize your business and personal needs. Choosing for your checks need not be full of hassles and shortcomings. Rather, it should be an exciting and productive way in generating the right and precise design for your checks.

Every business owner and journalist I know is talking about the advantages of cloud computing. But what is it, what is the impact on business and what are the monetary and tangible upsides?

Cloud means Internet. The computing occurs on the Internet – instead of the software you use being installed on your desktop pc, it’s hosted on the Internet on a server located in a data centre usually staffed by people who are adept in managing technology. This type of “cloud” software is often referred to as “on demand” or Software as a Service (SaaS).

Some well known examples of well established Software as a Service are:

Web based CRM Software (Customer Relationship Management) – Salesforce.com pricing approximately $9 per user/month.
Small business management and accounting software (small business ERP) – Salesorder.com pricing $45 per user/month.
Medium sized business ERP software – NetSuite pricing about $99 per user/month.

There are a number of key benefits for every business here:

Time, cost savings and reliability

Businesses no longer need a permanent information technology professional to help them procure, bed in and look after the systems platform thus cutting operating expenses and time to get operational. The effort of constantly backing up information is removed as this is almost always an inherent function of the “cloud” software. Cloud software “operators” almost always have stand by systems that can be deployed in minutes should a major error occur.

Easier selection and wider choice

Through the ubiquitous web browser, businesses now have instant access to a massive choice of software packages they can in most cases immediately test and rapidly assess if the software fulfils their needs at zero cost. This makes it effective for people in large businesses to by pass the standard information technology buying processes and easily assess and prove their business proposal.

Better user experience

The cloud provides instant feedback to application architects and has led to amazing progress in user interface design resulting in more intuitive systems thus improving learning times and improving user satisfaction. This of course means faster adoption and higher productivity.

With finance departments being held increasingly accountable for their fixed assets UK wide, and with the ever-changing requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, IFRS, GAAP  and the Turnbull Guidance (to name but a few), the need for an asset tracking UK wide system has never been greater amongst Commercial and Public Sector organisations alike. Whether in relation to reporting, security or providing an audit trail, organisations have to ensure they remain up-to-date with the current compliancy requirements for their sector.

And there certainly doesn’t seem to be any shortage of information and guidance when it comes to those asset accounting UK standards, nor is there any lack of seemingly endless acronyms:  IFRS, Sarbanes Oxley (Sarox), GAAP, ASB and IASB. Certain types of company or organisation are legally obliged to comply with most, if not all, of these accounting standards and that means having a robust and reliable fixed assets UK system in place.  

In today’s globalised marketplace, the situation is further complicated by the international relationships that many UK companies may have in place. If you are a US company with a listing on the US stock exchange, a UK or European subsidiary of a US listed company or a UK or European company with no division in the USA, but still with listings on the US stock exchange, then you must comply with SOX.

Even if you only have a slight exposure to the US market (e.g. a supplier to a company based in the US) then may well be affected by SOX. If you are a European company with listings on both your own national stock exchange and the US stock exchange, you will find that you are subject to the requirements of both Sarbanes-Oxley and IFRS regulations which dictate that financial statements provide uniformly adequate and transparent information about an organisation’s financial performance for the purpose of international comparison.

Many accounting departments rely on spreadsheets as a well established means of recording results.  They are quick and easy to set up and relatively easy to modify. Simple calculations are easily defined and the spreadsheet is a practical tool for management wanting to make “what-if” projections.However at the level of accounting complexity required by today’s environment, spreadsheets can quickly become complex and difficult to verify. Integrating a spreadsheet with other enterprise systems and tracking asset changes or producing a clear audit trail can also be challenging.

A far better solution is to use dedicated and tailor-made software, particularly for asset register, which is able to control, track and record all the changes that occur within an asset’s lifetime. Real Asset management UK for example has systems that will provide accurate, up-to-date and historical data spanning the entire time from the point from which the asset was entered onto the system to its present state. User-definable fields means that organisations have the freedom to describe things in their internal corporate language and a Windows inspired interface ensures that users can very quickly become adept.

Systems like these save users both time and effort by eliminating the need to manually enter/update each asset and provide a seamless interface with leading general ledger products, thus retaining any prior software investment you may have made. Organisations can choose to consolidate multiple registers for group reporting purposes and so can concurrently maintain discrete financial information. Any number of historic and/or current cost accounting books can be set up to allow different values and currencies to be associated with individual assets and the ability to create fully comprehensive and detailed asset histories makes it far easier, quicker and cheaper to keep track of your physical and IT assets and remain fully compliant.

As corporate purse strings get increasingly tightened in this period of downturn, the need for organisations to perform IT fixed asset tracking is becoming more of a priority.This is usually the responsibility of the IT department.I spoke to a number of IT department managers in various businesses and organizations to find out how they deal with IT asset tracking.

Spreadsheets
fixed asset register] information in a giant spreadsheet.  It basically works a little like this. The initial spreadsheet is built up with a manual audit of every piece of equipment and software in the company.  The common details that are tracked are date of purchase, make and model, serial number, warranty info, location and name of user.  New purchases of hardware and software are then added to the spreadsheet as and when they occur. As with many manual business functions, the spreadsheet’s downfall is that it doesn’t scale well at all.For larger businesses the spreadsheet can become extremely complicated.  The spreadsheet system also doesn’t react very well to changes, such as breakdowns, warranty uses, change of staff and software license expiration.You can imagine the fragility of a system that requires the constant attention of one very thorough person.

RFID & Asset Barcoding
Asset barcodes have been around for a while and are step up from manual data entry - each asset is given a specific barcode which stores all the relevant information from the asset register.A handheld barcode scanner is generally used to scan these asset tags, so that information can quickly and efficiently be obtained an update during regular asset audits. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, goes one step beyond traditional barcoding because they allow you to perform a hardware audit without physically scanning each asset. More importantly, RFID tracking allows greater flexibility for increasingly mobile equipment such as laptops and PDAs.

Fixed Asset Management Software
There are a good choice of semi-automated and customized asset management software solutions which take a lot of the pain out of the process. I have come across some companies who have created their own custom asset database using SQL and linking this to the intranet to allow multi-user administration. At the other end of the scale there is specialist asset management software which covers all the fixed assets of the organisation, including things such as vehicles, containers, property and machinery as well as IT assets.  There are also specially designed solutions to meet the growing plethora of asset accounting and tax regulations that companies need to meet - such as compliance with Sarbanes Oxley. The beauty of this integrated approach is it combines the needs of several departments including IT, accounting and management, to allow for a larger budget and amore robust solution. 

I’d certainly be interested to hear what methods your organization uses to track IT assets and whether you have any novel approaches.

This article looks at some of the less publicised ways in which accountants offer services to their clients, exploring what accountants will not do, what an accountant expects and what they will do for you in practical terms to support you, (besides look after your accounts or books). 

People often have different expectations about service than the people provding the services, and this is often the case with an accountant.Many expect accountants to only charge a small fee, even after working lengthy hours saving them large sums of money.They may even expect their accountant to turn a blind eye to tax evasion.

However, such expectations will not be met! Chartered Accountants are professionals, who have a duty to maintain professional standards, so they certainly will not ‘encourage’ tax evasion and will actively tell you that you are breaking the law if you do evade due taxes.An accountant will also charge at a professional services rate, which isn’t going to be the smallest of fees.

You can expect good service looking at how to maximise your money so you don’t pay too much tax or miss out on any savings.

Chartered Accountants abide by professional ethics and codes of conduct, service agreements, so you can expect your accountant to return phone calls, be reasonably available and give you advice about the state of your company or your books, how things are going and perhaps offer some directional advice about ensuring that you maximise profits for the year ahead.

Almost all accountants will argue that a good accountant will save you money.  They will ensure that you do not have to pay too much tax and you do not have to lose out on any tax breaks that may be available.  They will also help give at least some advice about money that should be invested or so on.  But accountants do not have a crystal ball, so they are not able to tell you what is a ‘safe place’ to put your money and what is not, although they may have a fair idea, the recent recession ahs shown that suddenly investments can become precarious, without anyone thinking that this was indeed the case.

So an accountant in Wrexham can certainly help you in lots of different ways and you should look forward to a good, productive professional relationship.

I manage a web company that provides help in the form of small business management and accounting software tools and know-how to thousands of startups and small businesses in all corners of the world and whenever I explain to people what I do, I constantly get asked the same question “Given my working knowledge, how could I capitalize on this and make earn cash quickly by becoming a small business consultant”? I am always delighted to offer guidance as I am fortunate enough to spend a lot of my day communicating with small business owners and workers ready to share their issues.

This is the advice that I offer:

The online world is the perfect medium for finding customers and it makes it simple to reach them and sell your expertise. A lot of small businesses turn to the internet to find knowledge or trusted advisors who can provide them with better ways of doing things and help them address key challenges.

Information marketing – package and sell your expertise to businesses through the Internet

What I discuss here is equally appropriate to businesses of any size. You can repackage and sell your expertise in a electronic format such as video, audio or documents. The tools to produce high quality content are widely available on the world wide web. Making a course in easy to consume internet formats is now easy and affordable. You just have to be prepared to dedicate a little time playing with the tools. The mission here is to produce some valuable material that you can either sell or give away to customers to encourage them to do business with you.

You should start with thinking through your objective. Consultancy and Information marketing are great bedfellows and if you do both can be very lucrative as the consultancy will provide you with the questions, the answers to which you can repackage and sell in digital format and sold over and over again.

If you are starting from scratch with no customers but have expertise you know would be attractive to others then make a two minute video to promote yourself and your expertise to your prospect(s). Unless you know the prospect(s) exact problem then make the video generic and stick tothe following format – S.T.A.R (Situation or Task, Action, Result). Be creative and concise. Now upload the video to your website/blog or even YouTube if you don’t have the former and send the target(s) an invitation by e-mail containing a personal message and a link to the video. Follow this up with a phone call. If you know the specific nature of the marketproblem then don’t make the video public, just put it somewhere secureon the Web or even on a disk and post it, again follow up with a call.

This approach is ideally suited to situations where you are individually targeting potential client(s). The one objective you should be constantly pursuing is the creation of a list that you can converse with and sell product to.. Treat the people on your list well and they will tell you their needs to which you can match and your content products. The more people on your list the more consulting and information marketing opportunities you will discover. If you would like to understand more about how to do this then click on any of the links in this article. I would be delighted to help you.