Swindon & Wiltshire News
Keeping on top of cashflow in your business
The purpose of any business is to generate cash for its owners, isn’t it? If it’s not doing that then something needs some attention fast.
Any business that is growing can rapidly generate a healthy appetite for cash for all sorts of reasons – marketing, people, raw materials, equipment. So keeping a careful eye on cashflow will be critical to success.
Even for a business that is not growing fast, it’s amazing how quickly some small changes in different elements of the business can combine to create a big change in the business’s ability to generate cash.
With any business where cashflow is a concern, I always tend to view it as the symptom of a problem, rather than the cause. Just as with our own health, treating the symptom might make us feel better for a while but it won’t remove the cause of the pain.
In a business, increasing the overdraft, factoring the invoices or stretching supplier payments may help for a while but if there is an underlying problem you can be sure that it will rear its ugly head again before long.
To help you focus on the opportunities to improve your cashflow, you could do any of these six things:
- Reduce your debtors (customers who owe you money)
- Increase your payment terms with suppliers
- Reduce your stock levels
- Increase your profit margins through pricing, product mix or purchasing
- Reduce your overheads
- Sell more
Or you could do all of them!
I have 18 questions which I would ask a business with a cashflow challenge. Contact me if you feel that going through them might help you – I’ll send it to you by return. Email me at nigelscott@actioncoach.com
