The only way a business is going to be able to do that is by sitting down with their Accountant to get the monthly management information pack from their Accountant.
If you don’t, then rest assured it’s imperative that you get in touch with a specialist such as me who can help you in keeping the cash in your bank account.
In order to do that however you will need to have a basic understanding of having controls set up to enable you to resolve any outstanding invoices pending to you.
For instance, what is industry specific to you, that would matter to you the most.
Having a basic report set up via Xero and/or any other Accountancy package will give you the basics, but what is the best way of tracking your debtors that owe you money.
Management information is important irrespective of the size of your business you run and it could simply be having data information arranged in rows and columns which are crucial to you and your business, by which this could be divided by the complexity and/or the relationship that you hold with your client base.
Once you have thee basics in place – are you absorb what your Cashflow is doing to your Breakeven point on a monthly and or quarterly basis enabling you to forecast your business future.
Basic reporting could be an array of data which could include the following details, set out in a specific order, such as:
– Reference Point
– Customer Name
– Date of Invoice
– Due date of Invoice
– Value of Invoice
– Contact Point
– AP Point (if different from Contact Point)
– The type of Product or Service that it has been billed against or for?
By using this, Invoices pending at the 1 month old Mark is based from the time that Invoices fall due after you have prescribed the amount of terms that any business could be granted at the time you agree your payment terms with your Clientbase.
As a general rule of thumb, 1 monthers could have volumes that are pending right from the get go and that a simple nudge or a push is all that is needed to get it onto the payment cycle to get it resolved quickly and sufficiently without hassle.
Those that could cause a need for further assistance is covered off in the next blog.