Archives / 144 post/s found
I want more money!
Prepare, prepare, prepare and if in doubt, prepare some more. If you are looking for someone else to put money into your business, it is your job to convince them. There will always be other businesses after their investment, so you need to make it crystal clear why they should pick yours. The most important factor to your investor will be your figures. These must be correct and must agree. Far too often people approach potential investors with incorrect figures that contradict each other. You need to understand what you are showing your investor. Your management accountant will help you [...]
Where is all my money going?
So, you have sorted your pricing out correctly. You are winning the right customers at the right rate, everything is brilliant…but your costs have spiralled out of control and they are eroding your profit margin. You need to act fast. Having a cloud-based accounting system and a management accountant will help you to keep your costs under control and prevent them sabotaging your profit. Taking the time to regularly check your costs is an investment in the future of your financial health. The first step is to review all processes and procedures. Many of the things that we do every [...]
What will HMRC avoid telling you?
There are three things that you can count on that HMRC will do: Calculate the amount of tax you owe based on the information they have gathered. Chase you for payment of this tax if not recovered by PAYE. Pursue you if they believe you have under-declared your taxable income or made excessive claims to reduce your tax. What they will not do is advise you to maximise the benefit of reliefs and allowances to which you are entitled to claim. HMRC rely to some extent on the age-old principal that ignorance of the law is not, [...]
Are home to work travel costs ever allowed?
Ordinary commuting between home and work incurs costs: either shoe leather, if you walk, or the cost of transport. For most employees these costs are considered to be personal costs and are not deductible for tax purposes. This is so even if your employer requests that you attend out of hours, say the weekend. According the HMRC: If an employee is sometimes required by his employer to attend their permanent workplace outside normal working hours, often at the weekend. This may mean that they incur extra costs on bus fares, meals eaten at their desk and sometimes even [...]
What’s your perfect price?
Pricing is notoriously difficult. We tend to undervalue ourselves, which inevitably leads to under-pricing ourselves. Under-pricing yourself leaves you having to work harder and longer hours, to maintain the same profit margin. Instead of managing as many customers as we can cope with, why not consider working with fewer clients, who pay who more? That way you can provide an excellent service or product to people who appreciate what you have to offer, without having to scrabble around working all hours for a tiny profit margin. The golden rule is a 10% increase to your prices will increase your profit [...]
Don’t let the tail wag the dog.
You need to be in control of your cash, otherwise your cash will end up being in control of you. A good cash flow is a great indicator of a healthy business. But do you know what your cash is doing? Obviously, you can see from your bank balance whether you have money or not, but that is a mere snapshot in time, a fleeting glance. Depending upon the circumstances that surrounds that moment, the picture may look utterly different the next day, or even a few hours later. But without access to good quality reports it can be hard [...]
It’s all in the process!
McDonalds, the fast food chain - and incidentally the 5th largest employer in the world - is renowned for its systems. The premise of this business model is that anyone, anywhere in the world, can pick up the “how to” book for McDonalds and do any of their one of their individual jobs. Their business model is extraordinary. It’s is heralded as the systems process model everyone should attempt to emulate if they are ambitious for growth. You may think the following: But my business is more complicated But it’s all in my head But I don’t have time to [...]
Don’t fall at the cash hurdle!
There is nothing more frustrating than watching a healthy, profitable business collapse due to cash flow problems. More profitable businesses fail for this reason than for any other. Don’t let yours be just another statistic. Cash flow problems come about when the gap between when your money comes into your account and when the money leaves your account becomes too large. This situation can be bought about by the bank changing their overdraft agreements, or a large customer suddenly defaulting on a payment, or simply a combination of bad luck and poor management. Different types of businesses are more at [...]
Know your numbers!
The problem with using generic Key Performance Indicators (or KPIs for short) is that all businesses are different. So the numbers that we need to understand to make better informed business decisions are different. The trick in optimizing the potential of cloud accounting reporting is in choosing which figures to look at. A good management accountant will make sure that you are basing your decisions on the correct set of figures, not on the wrong ones. The next part of this is to watch those figures, and see what they do, each week, every week. There is no point only [...]
Don’t look back!
One of the many quotes bandied around by people is: “don’t look back, you’re not going that way…” Like many clichés, this one contains a grain of truth, and never more so than when understanding the difference between financial and management accountancy. Financial accountancy is a simple record-keeping exercise that shows you a summary of what has happened in the previous year. It is used mainly by accountants to work out how much tax is due to HMRC. This process, filing your tax return and statutory accounts, and making any necessary payments, are a legal responsibility. Financial accounting is viewed [...]