Beat the Credit Squeeze With Flexible Business Finance (accountant)
No commentsBy Ben Needles
The credit squeeze is a fact of business life and is not just about money but confidence in the market too. There are always winners and losers in every business situation and confidence and business finance can beat the credit crunch.
1. Ensure the bookkeeping and financial accounts of the business are up to date.
Keeping the accounting records up to date is an essential first step to ensuring the business owner knows exactly where the business stands. Reviewing recent financial performance and taking positive action to increase sales and margins where possible and control costs by eliminating waste protects the business from surprises and downturns.
By having available the recent costs, views and action can be taken to reduce those costs and in some circumstances to increase business costs where the profit potential is highest. For example a detailed examination of advertising and promotion costs may indicate some campaigns should be reduced while the money saved invested in better performing areas.
Not all sales produce the same profit for the business. By concentrating efforts on the highest profit margin products and services the effect on working capital can be reduced which can take the pressure off working capital funding.
2. Preparing a realistic business plan can help the business plan ahead.
Many small businesses prepare a business plan when starting up especially if government grants or business finance is to be applied for. Failing to prepare an updated business plan during a credit squeeze can be a plan to fail.
During a credit squeeze a business can find itself operating in an unstable market where the rules and actions of the past might not be evident in the future. Banks increase the cost of borrowing, customers save money by leaving the market and sometimes failing to pay or at least taking longer. Suppliers tighten their grip by increasing prices and demanding tighter payment periods.
Business takes steps to protect income, cash flow, liquidity and in extreme cases survival. That is why failing to meet these new challenges is a plan to fail.
Prepare a business plan on the basis of the recent history and extend the financial results forward following the recent trends. Input into the financial forecast the opportunities that can be exploited to increase business and take a realistic view of the potential negative factors that may be suffered.
The business plan should include both a written view of the next twelve months ahead and include a profit and loss account reflecting the optimistic view and the most negative view with contingency plans should the worse scenario become a fact. A cash flow statement calculated from the business plan to show the effects on liquidity is a vital tool.
3. Improve financial flexibility to increase the business finance options.
Arrange the business finances with more than one bank and increase the number of financing options. A single bank may not offer the size of overdraft or loan facilities or the competitive rates the business requires. View the financial market as a competition between suppliers for your business finance and utilise several to spread the finance between them.
By maximising financial flexibility options for bank accounts, loans and overdrafts and financing asset purchases the effect on business progress can be minimised. Consider leasing agreements, invoice factoring and other specialist financial institutions in addition to the main bank account provider. Cash flow and working capital requirements are crucial.
4. Go out and get more sales.
When sales go down it is easy to become depressed. Fight it and remember how the business obtained new sales channels and customers in the past and exploit the opportunities in the future. Focus on the unique selling points of the business and its products and revitalise campaigns to increase sales.
Consider sales and product diversification into both related and other areas. There are always new opportunities including new products and markets, selling existing products to a wider audience including increased geographical presence. It may help to list all sales activities in sales channels and look for more sales channels in which they company can operate.
5. Ask for professional advice and assistance.
Increase the level of communication with each professional advisor including accountants, financial advisors, solicitors, bank managers and business advisors and any managers of financial institutions. The more the merrier and by keeping in touch more opportunities and more favourable responses will be possible.
There is no such thing as a silly question when the future of the business and its employees are at risk. Discussing options with a variety of professional advisors increases those options and if increased business finance is required for growth or survival in the future, the higher level of personal dialogue will ease that route forward.
Article Source : Article King Pro - Free Reprints and Distribution
About the Author (text)
Terry Cartwright of DIY Accounting designs small business accounting software http://www.diyaccounting.co.uk/ on excel spreadsheets providing complete bookkeeping and tax solutions and business finance options at http://www.diyaccounting.co.uk/financial_services.htm
Internet Marketing Using The Awesome Power of Articles
By Kuser3
One of the best ways to get traffic to any website today is article marketing. It’s a very popular method that webmasters use, but the problem is that most of them aren’t doing it right. If you are also using article marketing and aren’t seeing the results you should be seeing, then it’s obvious that you are also not doing it right.
You see, article marketing is very powerful, if you do it right. The fact that lots of people will find your articles in the article directories and even go on to use the articles in their websites and blogs, with backlinks to your sites, shows that if done right, it’s still the absolute best way to draw traffic to any website.
One of the best things with article marketing is the fact that it’s one of the rare Internet marketing techniques that can continue to bring in traffic months and years after an article has been submitted. A very well written article can continue to bring lots and lots of traffic to your website long after you have submitted it. And the fact that people will use the articles on their sites and blogs, with backlinks to your sites, shows that the traffic can become unstoppable.
Go ahead to start implementing article marketing now if you haven’t started already. It’s a powerful technique that can never fail, no matter how long it takes. Yes, it will cost you some money, if you don’t know how to write; and even if you do know how to write, it will take you time to write a very good article. But it’s time (or money) well spent. The results you will get from the efforts will be incredibly powerful in terms of backlinks to your sites, and increase in traffic - which will of course culminate in increased income for you.
But to get the absolute best results from article marketing, you shouldn’t write only one article and submit to all the article directories. This will not get you all the backlinks you deserve because the search engines will only give value to just some of the submissions because of what is called - duplicate content filter. They will filter all the other articles submitted in the other article directories because they are “duplicate” of the same original article.
To prevent this, use article spinning to spin the original article into several hundreds of versions. When using article spinning, ensure you take your time to do it right. If you don’t, you will end up with junk and ugly looking articles. Article spinning is a skill that if learnt will help you end up with lots and lots of very well written articles that will give you lots of backlinks when you submit the different versions to the hundreds of article directories. If done well, the search engines will index all your versions and give you the rewards in terms of backlinks and good rankings.
Two of the very good article spinning tools that I recommend are PlugAndSpin.com and Jetspinner.com. Both of them are completely free and they can be upgraded to submit the various spun versions of your articles to the hundreds of article directories out there. Trust me, if you do article spinning right, using PlugAndSpin.com or Jetspinner.com, you will get absolute good results from your article marketing efforts. Yes, I know. I have been there and done that!
To get the best results from article marketing, use this awesome
Free Article Spinning Software to effectively and excellently Spin Your Articles . ==> http://www.PlugAndSpin.com
Little Known Facts About Computer and Internet Hosting — Discover Practical Topics
By Nathan Knightley
A goal that many people have these days is making money online. There are as many reasons as there are people. Some persons want to get rich fast and the easy way while others do not mind to put a lot of time and effort into it. I don’t know which category you fit in…
Hi, I have been on the the Web since 1996. Let me reveal to you a little tip before going any further in the search for online riches. I have built a few companies in the real world and also in this Web virtual world and I have noticed that one thing remains invariable either in a real world business or in the virtual world of the Internet. What is it you might ask?
The answer is, virtual world or not, that in both cases, you are dealing with real people.
If you take a few minutes to think about this, it might have quite an impact on your business. Why? Because if you open up a brick and mortar business anywhere in the world you eventually will be dealing with people. And do you know what it means? It means you are dealing with emotions. In doing business, emotions play a big part. The proof is that large corporations spend more money to target the emotions than the product itself.
You see that emotions play a large role in buying a product or a service. But on the Web you do not meet someone face to face obviously so the only way to carry emotions is through written words and pictures on a Iternet site page. So you can see that it is very essential to understand how people will react at what they see.
Perception is a major player. If they appreciate what you have to offer you are almost there, but they need to trust you and like you. building trust on the Internet is THE major challenge. In the real business world they see you and get to know you, on the Web it is not the same thing. You might be a world away and you won’t meet in person.
Honesty is also an important quality. I want to warn you immediately if you hope that you will build a good long lasting business online thinking that you can get away with scams and other shady plans you better stop reading right here, you are not at the right place. You have to start your Internet business with good honest motives, which are in fact the foundations of any solid business.
Now, lets think what could be a great method to start making money online. You need a product or a service of course. Offer and demand is the key. What could be a product or a service that everybody having a business on the Internet has to have. Well you are looking at the answer at this very moment! You have to have A WEBSITE! Websites are the backbone of the Internet.
Do you know which products/services have the largest demand on the Internet?
ONE of the biggest demand to have a business online is web hosting. Why? Each day millions of websites are required to present billions of pages on the Web. Each day thousands of websites are created and need web hosting to place their new pages! It is the foundation of the entire Internet, it is as simple as that. Now since everyone needs a web host to do business on the Internet wouldn’t be nice to be able to fill that need? Yes it would!
Now since your goal is to make money online, another smart rule of business is the money you spend has to be an investment. Well how about if you could get paid for your web hosting? What? Say again? Why not getting paid for your hosting. Read on… This is where the rubber hits the road.
This busy writer is also an information expert and genuinely likes to provide his infos with readers like you. Read more now about How To Make Money Online and concerning Computers and Web Hosting solution at his website
target=”_blank” href=”http://www.howtomakemoneyonlineguide.com”>http://www.howtomakemoneyonlineguide.com
Find Accounting Information And Resources For Your Business
Friday, October 31st, 2008 at 9:45 am and is filed under business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
