CFF

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 – 1969)

CASH FLOW FORECAST

What is more important to your business than cash flow? Ultimately, it all boils down to this, right? After all, it’s the reason you got that entrepreneurial itch in the first place. It’s OK to admit it. Without profits and cash flow, you’re out of business and a lot of people are out of work. Your most important job is to manage the finances of your business to ensure cash flows properly. Getting this wrong is what kills businesses, it’s how they die. You want to live and to prosper. That’s the spirit that made this the best country on the planet.

The problem with using your books to tell you how your business is doing is that accounting can only show you the past. Where you’ve been. History. It’s like driving a car by looking in the rear view mirror.

To see the future and not the past, you need to turn around as a business owner and look forward. The future of your business’s profits depend on decisions, actions, and directions you will take today. You cannot do anything about the past. You can only affect the future. That’s your job.

Maybe you’ve tried to do a budget with your accounting software or maybe you made a budget from scratch with Excel. The problem with traditional budgets is that in practice, they are actually not very useful. Oh sure, they are good at pointing out (all year long) what numbers you got wrong. Yeah, that’s real helpful. Chances are, if you’ve done a budget, you abandoned it after a while anyway.

What if my little company could help you win? What if I had a simple and inexpensive process, a set of tools, that could help you manage your company finances better? Would that be of interest to you?

I’d like to introduce you to a different kind of budget. In fact, I don’t even like the word, budget. Budgets are static. Boring. My process is dynamic. Alive. I prefer to call this a cash flow plan. Let me show you why it works.

As I say, it is a dynamic process. We start by developing a base 12 month, side-by-side, monthly plan. We work together to revise, refine, and tweak it. We update it after each month with your actual numbers. There are many variables, like how you collect your receivables, how you pay your payables, how seasonal your sales pattern is, that go into this base plan. I have developed business budget forms to give you the tools to gather the information needed from your historical bookkeeping.

Once the base plan is developed, we go over the plan carefully to check for errors and to revise it. For example, unless a plan has ALL the elements, it’s no good. Just forecasted P&L’s or Income Statements is not enough, you have to do forecasted balance sheets too to make sure the P&L forecasts are working properly and then you have to look at the forecasted cash flows- now we’re getting somewhere!

Do you see? It’s the CASH FLOWS that really matter!

Imagine it. You will be able to spot a cash crunch months in advance. You will see where your money will come from and where it will go. You will see where the drains on cash are. You will see where you can save money. YOU WILL SEE THE FUTURE, NOT THE PAST.

A base plan of side-by-side 12 months of P&L’s, tweaked to be the best it can be.

Numbers replaced each month with actual results. More accurate.

You get another set of eyes (me) looking at your numbers. Can’t hurt.

You are seeing in advance, in time to do something about it.

You are finally looking forward, where you can have an affect, and seeing more clearly.

Would this be worth a small monthly fee to you?

Call (814) 431-4212 today and let’s get started working ON your business.

Bruce P. Van Cleve, President

10 Minute Payroll, Inc.