Kinspeed Sage - 7 tips to supercharge your business decisions

6 kinspeed.com 7 tips to supercharge your business decisions Spend and save wisely It’s inevitable: any decision you make as a business needs to factor in how it will affect your finances. You’re probably keeping an eagle eye on this already, but there are a few easy ways to improve visibility over your finances, reduce the time you spend crunching numbers, and make more use of the insights you gather from financial analysis. Tip 6: Automate your cash flow processes It’s amazing how much can happen between a transaction taking place in a bank account and that same transaction showing up in your accounting software. Mostly what happens is data entry: someone spends ages manually copying across numbers, manually matching transactions with invoices, and weighing up the impact on your finances. But lots of important business decisions can also be made in that time. Let’s say a huge transaction has just come out of your bank, but it won’t appear in your accounts until the end of the day. You might choose to invest in new equipment, take on a new employee, or chase a customer for payment based on a set of data that’s no longer true to your actual financial situation. By connecting your accounting software directly to your business bank account, any new transactions will show up quickly in your accounting software, ensuring that you’re making decisions based on the most accurate, up-to-date picture of your finances. You’ll also cut down on the time you spend on low-value manual data entry, giving yourself more time to focus on the big picture. Tip 7: Use payment reports to identify your best products and customers With so many things to juggle at a small business, deciding where to invest your time and money first can be tricky. When it comes to making credit decisions—whether that’s applying for a loan or making a large investment—having easy access to the right metrics can make a huge difference. You’ll already be tracking traditional financial metrics such as expenditure and profit, but many financial decisions will depend on much more specific details. Let’s say a particular customer is asking for more support from your product team and you need to know whether investing more time in them will be worthwhile, or if you’re just going to lose time and money nurturing them with no payoff. With the right reporting tool, you can gather data on the customer’s average spend, stage in the customer lifecycle, loyalty, and tendency to repurchase—all the information you need to make your decision based on the facts. Equally, you can decide whether or not to buy certain materials and supplies in bulk, spend more on R&D, hire a new employee, or make any other kind of big expenditure, secure in the knowledge that you’re making a sound financial decision. With so many things to juggle in a small business, deciding where to invest your time and money first can be tricky.