Manage Cash or Costs?
Even before the “everything costs more!” period we are facing now, managing your costs was always one of the most important things for your business. Furthermore in inflationary times managing cash in total is what your business needs to stay healthy. So how do you go about doing both? Here is a simple plan of action you can take to improve your cash flow.
- Pareto your costs and look at both ends. You can reduce costs faster by reducing or eliminating major costs. Then put controls in place to force a re-evaluation of every other cost. Before cash goes out be convinced the spend is still necessary and valuable to the business.
- Invest your time to evaluate and improve your business processes. Business Process Mapping (BPM) will make it clear where you can both rip out costs and speed up your business. Furthermore, it will expose manual effort that is both a waste of time and money.
- Take a hard look at your technology. Are you still running your business by spreadsheets? Don’t get me wrong spreadsheets are fun to use where it makes sense. But I have seen countless businesses trying to efficiently and effectively run their operations on spreadsheets alone! At a minimum invest in efficient financial technology. Even if you are a small-to-medium-size business something like Oracle NetSuite or Sage Intacct will wow you!
And the good news is you do not have to do this all on your own. TIMIT, and many other qualified IT consulting firms, can do the bulk. We can facilitate Cost Out and BPM sessions with your business leaders. And we can even do the lion’s share of a technology upgrade or package implementation. If you are curious take the first step and get on my calendar to discuss your specific situation.