Industry Talk

Regular Industry Development Updates, Opinions and Talking Points relating to Manufacturing, the Supply Chain and Logistics.

How to Keep Track of Your Business’ Finance

If you are looking to start the next big project on your business, you may be looking for ways to optimize your business finance, so you can reinvest more money on the company.

There are four tips that can help you to reduce expenses and scale your business as soon as you implement them. Once we understand how our income is organized, we can plan strategically to prevent potential obstacles and grow the company much faster.

 

Business Expense Tracking. The Importance Of Metrics And Software

It is fundamental to have a detailed inventory of the assets of the company and how their value fluctuates. Your ability to measure the accurate numbers of your business comes down to using enough metrics, implementing the right software, or hiring the best accountants.

When using enough metrics, you can start to make more accurate predictions about the performance of your business, prevent potential obstacles, and thing long term. In fact, predictive metrics reveal many company strategies that may seem not intuitive at first.

Of course, it takes time to do the research for business finance. In some periods, your company may register such different expenses that it can be difficult to be on track of everything. Here is where business expense tracking tools become highly useful.

Ideally, the business owner should delegate or automate the finance operations, investing a few hours per month to review results. Once they are properly managing their money, they can spend most of their time creating new products and marketing strategies.

 

Focus On The Most Relevant Activity First

It is great to keep on track of your expenses, but how do you prevent your business from adding unnecessary costs in the near future?

The 80/20 Rule is a good place to start preventing those expenses and find what is essential. This rule states that there is usually a tiny group of activities that produce the majority of your results. Likewise, there is a large portion of secondary activities that contribute very little to grow your business. What are these activities?

It may be prospecting, updating your service, leading your team better, or adding new products to the selection. When you invest more money and time on the right activities, you will get much more satisfactory results.

The exercise of this strategy is to prioritize. Whenever you come up with new software, another strategy, or an expensive system that claims to make you money, look for the mentioned conditions. If you can get more things done with it, it is a good investment. Otherwise, it is a liability.

 

Investing And Spending

 

This point is related to the previous one, which is to spend more on what matters.

A frequent piece of advice that you will hear in finance is to optimize your expenses and spend less money on the business.

If you are looking to scale your business, you may want to reduce expenses while investing in the business, not stopping to spend completely. There are activities that produce more results as you put more money on them, while others are not necessary.

You shouldn’t stop investing in the systems that make the business work, but increasing the amount sent. Sometimes, the only way to put more money on important things is to take them away from other projects that are not essential.

 

Strategic Growth

In other situations, you may need to invest more in the business to make it grow faster. Would you do it, even if your profit margins are already tight?

You can increase the current expenses of the business if that produces enough economic growth in the future. This is an advanced strategy that requires the ability to predict results in your company which requires metrics.

There are multiple advantages of thinking long term in finance that can help you save costs and time.