Greetings!

Cash flow improvement is a hot issue for small businesses; in many businesses, it seems like there is never enough cash when you need it. The last thing a business owner wants is to reduce their cash balance unnecessarily. To help you preserve or increase your cash, here are five cash management leaks to avoid.

1. Bloated Bank Fees 

Some banks are more business-friendly than others. We recommend you assess the fees you are currently being charged to see if you can discontinue any unnecessary services.

  • Could you maintain a cash balance to avoid monthly fees?
  • Are you being charged online banking fees and bill pay fees, and are these still necessary?
  • Are you being charged for a high volume of transactions or cash drawer services, and are these competitive with other banks?

Banks, including national brands, that have not kept up with technology and have not automated a significant amount of their transactions are inefficient and must charge higher fees to cover their processing costs. If your accounts are located at one of these costlier banks, you do have a choice.

2.   Overtaxed

Are you sure that you are paying the lowest amount of taxes you legally owe? There are several places to look to make sure you have not overpaid taxes anywhere in your business or personally:

  • Payroll taxes
  • Sales and use tax
  • Franchise taxes
  • State and local income taxes
  • Property taxes
  • Federal income taxes
  • Taxes that are specific to your industry

In preparing income taxes, a few of the easiest items to overlook include carryovers from prior years and new deductions you become eligible for. If you received a large refund this year, congratulations, but that means you gave Uncle Sam an interest-free loan on your money. You can do better next year by estimating your tax payments and paying only what’s due.    

3. The Check Is in the Mail

Customers who take too long to pay you are big cash drains in your business. Consider changing your terms, asking for deposits, or becoming more aggressive with collections to bring your DSO (days sales outstanding) down. When you do, you’ll get an instant, permanent cash flow improvement.        

4. Sweat the Small Stuff

You may have an eagle eye on your largest bank account, but what about your other cash stashes? PayPal, petty cash, and business savings accounts are among the places that may not get daily scrutiny. Make sure those accounts are properly reconciled and have the proper controls in place so funds don’t go missing.  

5. It’s in Your Interest 

A nice problem to have is when your bank balances get too large and you don’t need the money immediately. Make sure that money is still working hard for you by putting the excess in an interest-bearing account. It’s not much these days, but every little bit helps.

Make a Dash to the Cash

If we can help you plug any of these cash leaks in your business, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know.

Greetings!

Running a business usually means putting in over 40 hours a week. In fact, if you’re the typical entrepreneur, you have more ideas you want to implement than you have time for! That’s when proactive, strategically executed prioritization can make all the difference. 

So Hard to Choose

If you have lots of ideas in your head or on your “to do” list that are not getting done, you’re certainly not alone. Here’s a process for helping you decide what to do first, next, and not at all.

Step 1:

Write down your ideas, tasks, “to-do’s” and projects
This includes items you need to do on a daily basis. Use a spreadsheet and list each item in a row by itself. Later you’ll want to be able to sort the list, so we recommend using Excel or another spreadsheet software.

Once you have everything down on paper, you will be amazed at how much this unclutters your thinking. You will also have all your great ideas captured so you don’t forget them. You might also get very overwhelmed, but don’t stop now. Relief is on the way.

Step 2:

Add some information about each item, creating four additional columns:

1. Is this item about working:
IN your business (client work, overhead, etc.) or
ON your business (new products or new services, developing procedures, hiring more staff, marketing, creating new partnerships)?
2. Is this item revenue-generating? Or will you lose revenue if you don’t get it done?
3. Can you delegate this task or does it have to be done by you?
4. If you were to hire someone to do this task,how much would it be worth per hour?

Step 3:

Analyze your choices

Once you have these additional items filled in, you can go wild with opportunities. Here are some very cool eye-opening activities to try:
  • Separate tasks that are working ON vs. IN your business. There is never enough time to work on your business, so force it by blocking out a few hours or a half-day a week and do it, no matter what. It might be the best way to make progress in your business.
  • Sort the list by how much revenue the task could generate or how much potential it has, and decide how to prioritize from there. If you need help calculating the ROI, return on investment of an idea, we can help you calculate that.
  • Take a look at what you marked “not able to delegate,” and ask “why not?” Does a procedure need to be written? Do you need more staff? Does your staff need training? Or do you need to learn to let go? Whatever it is, and especially if there are a lot of these items, get these roadblocks tackled so you don’t become the bottleneck in your own business.
  • Sort the list by “column D” above, the market value you recorded for the task. Then ask yourself what your hourly rate is. How many tasks are you doing that are below your hourly rate? Hiring someone to do your lowest level tasks could very well be another item you need to add to your new “to do” list.

This last one is really important, because it can so strongly affect the profitability of your business. The last thing you want to do is go backwards and give yourself a demotion with a pay decrease, but that’s exactly what you’re doing each time you do a task yourself that’s at a low market rate.

Step 4:
Prioritize with confidence
With all of this information in an organized spreadsheet, you will gain the clarity you need to make some powerful decisions about how to spend your time.

Time

There’s nothing more precious and scarce than our time. Every day, we have a choice about how to spend it, but too often we get caught up in the urgent, but not important, daily fires. This exercise helps us take a step back and look at what’s important instead of what’s urgent.

 Not using progress invoices? Maybe you should be.

Greetings!

The U.S. economy may be picking up, but your customers are probably still being very careful with expenditures. If your company’s finances will allow it, you can help them out on sizable jobs by using progress invoicing, also known as partial billing or progress billing.

You could, of course, simply create invoices for smaller chunks of the job as they come. A smarter way is to build estimates for the entire job or sequential phases so your customer can see the big picture. You can still use progress invoicing to start collecting funds one segment at a time.

How to Proceed  

First, be sure you have progress invoicing turned on. Go to Edit | Preferences | Jobs & Estimates | Company Preferences and make sure the Yes button is filled in next to the questions about estimates and progress invoicing.

Now create your estimate (these instructions are for QuickBooks Premier 2013; your steps may vary slightly). Go to Customers | Create Estimates. When you’ve entered all of the items you want to include in this phase of your project, click the Create Invoice button. This window will open:

Figure 1: You can decide how many of your estimate items will be included on your progress invoice.

By clicking one of these buttons, you can bill the customer 100 percent of what’s due on the invoice or just a percentage. But let’s say you and your customer have agreed that payment will be due in pre-defined stages, so click the third button and select one or more of the line items. Click OK. QuickBooks will display a new window that lets you select items and/or percentages of amounts due.

In our example here, we’re going to invoice the customer for two items, the blueprints and floor plans. So we selected the button next to Show Quantity and Rate and entered the full estimated quantity for each item in the QTY columns (if you chose Show Percentage, new columns would appear). It would look like this:

Figure 2: You can select specific items or percentages for your progress invoice.

Click OK. QuickBooks will return to your progress invoice, which you can save and print or email to your customer. Your original estimate will remain unchanged.

Tip: If you don’t want any of the zero amounts to appear on the progress invoice, go to Edit | Preferences | Jobs & Estimates | Company Preferences and make sure there’s a check mark in the box next to Don’t print items that have zero amount.

Following Up

When you want to bill for another set of items on this estimate, simply repeat these steps.

Here’s an easy way to determine how much (if any) of the estimate has been invoiced. Go to the Customer Center and select the customer. Click the arrow next to the Show field and select Estimates. Any estimate that has a zero in the OPEN BALANCE column has been completely billed.

QuickBooks provides a report that tells you where you are with all of your progress invoices. Go to Reports | Jobs, Time & Mileage | Job Progress Invoices vs. Estimates. Your report will include the progress invoice you just created:

Figure 3: You can see what percentage of each estimate has been included on a progress invoice in this report.

More Options

What if you determine that you won’t have one or more of the items on the estimate? QuickBooks lets you quickly generate a purchase order. With your estimate open, click Create Purchase Order to select the item(s) needed and generate the form. You can also click Create Sales Order if one is necessary.

Estimates provide a useful way to fine-tune your bookkeeping and inform your customers about impending costs. They can also be confusing if you don’t keep up with them. We can help you determine when they’re a good idea and how to keep them organized. QuickBooks provides good tools here, but they require some administrative control.

This article of QuickBooks Tips and Tricks was based on the 2013 version of QuickBooks.

Rhonda Rosand, CPA has successfully completed the requirements to earn her designation for the ninth consecutive year as a Certified QuickBooks® ProAdvisor.

Certified QuickBooks® ProAdvisors are CPA’s, accountants and other professionals who have completed comprehensive QuickBooks® training courses and met the annual testing requirements in order to become certified as experts in QuickBooks®. The courses are designed for accounting professionals and consultants who have a solid understanding of accounting principles.

An accounting professional since 1986 and a Certified Public Accountant since 1992, Rhonda is a one-of-a-kind, live-your-dreams business coach and trainer. She has real-world business experience, well-honed problem-solving skills and an enthusiastic, energetic, can-do attitude. She believes that a successful business stays that way not only by managing its finances well, but also through a proactive plan that includes marketing, strong customer service and long range planning. “Today it is not enough to have a good advisor who works with you once a year”, says Rosand. “The best approach is to actively manage all aspects of your business, all year long.”

Rhonda Rosand, CPA is the owner of New Business Directions. She specializes in QuickBooks® consulting and training services, coaching small business owners and providing innovative business solutions.

To learn more about New Business Directions and QuickBooks®, or to schedule an appointment, please call (603)356-2914, email rhonda@newbusinessdirections.com or visit the website at www.newbusinessdirections.com.