Keeping your finger on the pulse of your business

When running a small to medium sized business, it's a good idea to:

• have just enough stock on hand to deliver customer orders on time
• ensure sales to customers generate sufficient profits to cover all running costs and a reasonal rate of return for your investment
• monitor your cash flow, ensuring customers pay their bills on time, and you don't pay your bills earlier than necessary. You should also be aware of any unusual expenses so they can be investigated

To grow your business, you'll need to:

• identify and focus your marketing on products and services that generate the most return
• increase your capacity to handle the growth of your business without stressing out your team
• take advantage of efficiencies of scale, such as higher volume purchase discounts, reduced administration and distribution expenses

You can start to do this by hiring a good management accountant with the skills to extract this sort of information from your accounting system and present it to you in a meaningful way.

Or you could substantially automate this process by investing in a Business Intelligence Centre, that will extract key performance indicators from your accounting system and present it in a series of easy to understand dashboards and management reports.

More information: Axsapt

Business Intelligence

A good Business Accounting System will help you accurately record your business transactions such as revenues and expenses, assets and liabilities. You do this to ensure that all your income is properly invoiced and collected and you maintain control over your expenses.

You also have a statutory responsbility to accurately calculate profits for tax purposes and keep track of withholdings from your employees to remit to the Government.

In the process of running your business and recording all these transactions, wouldn't it be nice to analyse your past activities to alert yourself of potential problems and identify opportunities to improve your business profitability?

A Business Intelligence ("BI") system will help you make sense of your business activities and transactions by:

• Presenting results into easily understood tables and graphs
• Calculating Key Performance Indicators ("KPIs") that highlight inefficiencies with inventory, customers, suppliers and other areas of your business
• Categorising your customers, products and services and comparing the results achieved by sales representatives over time and across similar categories to identify potential opportunities

A good BI tool will work with disparate business systems in your organisation and eliminate the need to rekey information into Spreadsheets.

The ultimate aim of BI is to make more informed business decisions.

More information: Axsapt