There are many ways of improving Cash Flow for a business and we have given you a few ideas to do just that.

To help you see how these ideas can help your business it would be worth while doing some cash flow projections. The Cash Forecaster can be used as a management tool to identify critical costs areas of the business and how these impact the future cash-health of the business.

For example – you might like to experiment with introducing Factoring or Invoice discounting to improve the flow of cash from your customers whilst you are in expansion mode – Just because a business is making a profit it might still fail if the profits are not turned into cash – Remember ‘Cash is King’ in business!

You may have heard of the term ‘Over Trading’ – Over trading is where a business is making good sales and turnover but that it is not able to keep up with the payments to suppliers simply because their customers are late in paying the company. The obvious way to correct this is to make sure that your payment terms to your suppliers are more generous than those given to your customers. Alternatively, the introduction of Factoring will help.

Having a Cash Flow Management tool to hand will help you to explore the effect these ideas will have on your business:

1. Increase sales and in particular those involving cash payment or payment by either standing order or direct debit.
2. Reduce your direct and indirect costs and overhead expenses.
3. Consider increasing your prices and especially to your slow payers – see Bowraven’s “Profit Increase Software“
4. Review the payment performances of customers and be more selective when granting credit – start using a credit report company to check the credit worthiness of potential customers.
5. Consider up-front deposits or multiple stage payments – approach a loan company to advance the money to you and offer credit terms to customers.
6. Reduce the amount of credit given to customers and change your payments terms – i.e. reduce the time allow for customers to pay.
7. Introduce factoring or invoice discounting to accelerate receipts from sales.
8. Make sure that your sales invoices are raised as soon as the work has been completed.
9. Offer early payment discounts and consider introducing late payment charges or fees.
10. Generate regular reports on receivable ratios and aging or your customer balances and use more pro-active collection techniques – involve your sales team and make sure that any commissions are only paid where customers pay the company.
11. Consider the 80/20 rule with regards to your customer list and product lines – make sure you know where your profits are coming from. You might well find that 80% of your profits are coming from 20% of your customers or 80% of your profits from 20% of your product lines – if either of these are true consider not dealing with the 80% of customers and cancel the 80% of non profitable product lines. Be careful when do this, as it might be that certain products are reliant on others, in which case they may be ‘Loss-Leaders’.
12. Take a look at how you pay your suppliers – ask for extended credit terms. Get new quotes from other suppliers and re-negotiate prices of supplies.
13. Try to reduce your stock levels (inventory levels) and improve control over work-in-progress – make sure that you are billing work in progress on a regular basis and keep write-offs under review.
14. Sell off or return obsolete/excess stock (inventory).
15. Defer or re-stage all capital expenditure.

Planning these changes and which ones work best for your business can be done using our tried and tested Cash Forecaster.

Post by Russell Bowyer

Bowraven has recently launched it’s latest versions of the Cash Forecaster with the following versions:

- Cash Forecaster – Basic: Will forcast for up to 12-months on a monthly basis.
- Cash Forecaster – Standard: Will forecast for up to 3 years on a monthly basis for each year.
- Cash Forecaster – Vision: Will forecast for up to 5 years on a monthly basis for each year.
- Cash Forecaster – Pro and Pro Plus: will forecast for up to 7 years on a monthly basis for each year.

The latest version have been fully revised and re-vamped and include the following features:

- Forecast profit and loss and cash flows for up to 7-years on a monthly basis for each year.
- Balance sheet for the opening period and at the end of each period end.
- An option to enter up to 10 loans or hire purchase (Depending uponthe version you purchase) with a number of key features allowing you to have loan repayment holidays, interest charged to the loan or directly to the cash flow and much more.
- Up to 20 product lines with associated cost of sales lines (the number of product lines depends upon the version you purchase.
- Automatically calculates overdraft or deposit interest.
- The feature of entering flexible customer payment terms ranging from cash sales, 30-days, 60-days, 90-days and 120-days. Not only that you can allocate percentages to each payment term, as we all know customers never pay on the same date as each other.
- Flexible supplier terms allowing you to allocate a different term to each cost of sale and expense line.
- Automatic credit card charges where this is appropriate to your business.
- VAT or Sales Tax terms – the Cash Forecaster will do all the necessary calculations.
- Company tax calculator with features that allow you to adjust the profit to a taxable profit and the rate of tax and when it is paid for each of the forecast periods.
- Flexible depreciation rates and automatic calculations for any number of rates and methods that you can choose.
- Up to 30 overhead expense lines – each with its own supplier payment terms.
- Simple stock and work in progress feature.
- Factoring or Invoice Discounting option with a number of great features to allow you to see the effect of either starting or finishing invoice financing (available on the Vision, Pro and Pro Plus versions only).
- Easy income and cost of sales sensitivity analysis tool without the need to re-enter data so that you can trial various scenarios.
- Easily enter dividends or drawings by business owners and capital introduced or director/partner loans.
- Other debtors and other creditor facility.
- You can easily enter your opening balances of your business.
- Flexible headings that can be changed to suit your needs.
- Reports include an assumptions report, summary page of the forecasts which has a breakeven analysis, Cash flow forecast, profit forecast and trading summary showing the product lines, overhead report, balance sheet report, fixed asset report, loan report and VAT/Sales Tax report.

For more information and to download the latest Cash Forecaster – click here.

I am sorry for those readers of my blog that I stopped posting a weekly summary of the stock market indexes together with currencies and commodities.

This ended on 26 September, as I was not sure that this service really added to my blog, as there are already plenty of places to get this information.

However, if there are readers of this blog that have been affected by this decision please let me know and I will re-consider my position on this subject.