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The Secret to Less Anxiety over Business Cash Flow

Written by: Fiona Mati

Article Overview: To reap any significant earnings from your enterprise, you need to plan your business spending and a budget is crucial to business success.

Free Download - 12 Questions to ask when developing your consultancy business plan By Fiona Mati
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The Secret to Less Anxiety over Business Cash Flow

To reap any significant earnings from your enterprise, you need to plan your business spending and a budget is crucial to business success. Before mapping out spending, it is important to start with a forecast of expected incomes. This can be in terms of sales revenues, consultancy fees etc. To develop your forecast, first look at your past business income history (for instance sales revenue of the last year). This gives you an indication of what you can reasonably expect in the next year in terms of income.

It is also vital to take to take into account the factors that influence how much money your enterprise makes. For instance, in a clothing store, sales of jerseys will not be as high in the hottest month of the year. In case you don't have such records, start today by recording your sales and expenditure daily. At the end of the month, use this to forecast your expenditures for the next month, and so on. This process also allows you to get a clearer picture of what products or services are popular amongst your clients.

After looking at projected income, you need to look at several factors in the process that culminates in the received income. This is where you take into account materials required for production and inventory levels. At this point, you also need to forecast your labour needs based on expected production and how much you are expected to pay them.

Don't forget to add important costs such as marketing, rent, and the cost of upgrading or purchasing new equipment. If you borrowed money to start up or expand your business, you also need to include this amount as income and outline how you intend to repay the debt as a projected expense.

You can now complete your budget in the form of a budgeted income statement which consolidates all revenue and expense estimates you have made. There are a large number of free budgeting tools online that can take you through the budgeting process.

Budgeting is vital because if one sticks to it, the looming threat of financial loss diminishes. Once you have a track record of sales and expenditures, you are better placed to know when the low seasons in your business occur and budgeting helps you, to take steps to sail through them relatively unscathed.

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Home > African-Accounts > Fiona Mati > The Secret to Less Anxiety over Business Cash Flow
Article Tags: anxiety, budget, business cash flow, business success, earnings

About the Author: Fiona Mati
RSS for Fiona's articles - Visit Fiona's website

Fiona Mati is the CEO of the Youth Interactive Portal for Enterprise (Yipe.org), which hosts an online portal that provides East African youth entrepreneurs with free information and resources so that they are in a better position to access finance, learn about new business opportunities, and can easily register their businesses. The portal is the first of its kind in East Africa specifically targeting the youth, and provides free business skills training, a directory of sources of startup finance as well as step by step guides for business registration. On a wider scale, the portal also provides valuable information to aspiring entrepreneurs, students, finance institutions, government policy makers and development agencies seeking to promote sustainable wealth creation.

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Re: Improving Cash Flow Re: Improving Cash Flow - Thanks for your information. guide on how to avoid the problems of over trading. <-- Where is this guide? Any URL? guide on debt factoring and invoice discounting: the basics. <-- Where is this guide? Any URL? I just want to learn more about this. I am also looking for a good article on: What exactly is Cash Flow? Ways to improve cash flow at individual level and organizational level? I think it is a problem of thinking and mind sets problem. If we can change the way of spending, we can have more Cash. Robert
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My entry My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Victoria's Secret - Too Sexy? Victoria's Secret - Too Sexy? - This will be upsetting for some men. I just heard a report about Victoria's Secret and it was interesting. Their sales were down drastically in the 4th quarter of 2007 and the report was about how they are thinking the company has gotten too far away from the heritage that made it the blockbuster company it is. They are thinking the ads etc have become too sexy and the plan (at the moment) is to make the ads more sophisticated. That would be like the Super Bowl commercial which was very tasteful, but very different from any Victoria's Secret I've seen lately. Who do you all think the current sexy ads are targeting? I think its the men that they hope will buy these items for their female significant others. I hate to give Omarosa any kudos - but most women aren't "sold" on an item by an ad of a near naked sexy woman. Shri


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