Cash is King! But how can you effectively track cash through your business and retain or regain control of it? Watch this to find out…

Transcript:

Hi and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

Now today I wanted to talk to you about, really to follow on from some of the blogs I’ve been writing recently, which have been around the importance of management accounts and really monitoring the business.

Today I wanted to talk about cash.

We all know that ‘cash is king’, but it’s very easy to get drawn into the day to day and not actually monitor and control the cash that’s moving through a business as effectively as you can.

Good management accounts, as I’ve mentioned previously, should show you the movements of your cash through the period, either monthly or quarterly. They should show you how much comes into the business and how much goes out of the business.

The obvious one is if you’ve got more coming in than is going out that’s a good thing, happy days! But if you’ve got more going out, then you need to be looking at that and working out why.

• Is it just a blip?
• Is it something that you really need to address?

Because without good cash flow in the business, in fact positive cash flow, so more at the end of the quarter or month than at the beginning, your business isn’t growing, you’re not making money, you’re not going to be making a profit.

And that’s what we’re all here to do!

You need, if you’ve actually got more going out, you need to look at what’s going on in the business, and work out how you can take back control, how you can retain more of the cash in the business.

So how can you actually monitor that cash flow as easily as possible?

The easiest way is to, if you’re on Xero or QuickBooks, to set up some of the standard reporting that’s in there and look at your cash flow statement. Now we did do a blog post recently about what a cash flow statement is, so have a look at that if you’re not quite sure. But in essence it actually shows you the movements of your cash and the cash position and how that’s changed over the period.

There are more advanced reports that we can produce for you, we can show you how to set up, and those actually enable you to look at the cash movements pictorially.

So for those people, like me, that are less ‘numbers’, who when actually presented with a page of numbers aren’t like Chris who can look at them and know absolutely what’s going on. The pictorial representation of how your cash is moving can be really helpful. We can get those set up for you.

You can also disseminate those to your management team, perhaps to your senior management. If they’re not perhaps numbers orientated the pictorial reports will be able to make that much more accessible to them as well.

If you want to know more about cash and controlling the cash in your business, have a look at the website on our homepage towards the bottom, about two thirds of the way down. We have a download which is ‘Controlling the Cash in Your Business’, which will give you a lot more information about how to actually control that, and regain and retain control of the cash through the business.

If you haven’t seen it, and you’d like a copy, then just zap me a reply to this email, if you’re actually a client and getting this by email. If you’re not, then drop me an email to my email address and I’ll happily send you a copy out.

It will hopefully help you, just sort of gain more control, as I say, of the cash. It’s really easy to lose sight of the cash when you get drawn into the day to day, as I say, but with some focused attention you really can make a significant difference. Because a business will die very rapidly if you’re concentrating on sales but not concentrating on how cash is actually coming through the business.

If you’re scared of your cash or you feel that your cash position isn’t very good and you’re a little bit reluctant to have a conversation please don’t be!

Don’t run away from it, don’t hide from it; we’ve spoken to lots and lots of different people over the years who’ve got cash issues. It’s not going to be news, it’s not going to be new, you won’t be the last, so please do either pick up the phone, drop us an email, or go onto the website and book an initial meeting to have a chat about it.

We don’t judge, we’re just here to help, so please do get in touch rather than lay awake at three in the morning worrying about it.

I’ll leave you with that thought. Do have a look at your cash position and investigate those reports, and I’ll see you all very soon.