A healthy cash flow is essential to business. You might be the most popular business in the world with the highest customer base, but if you cannot capitalize on your sent invoices or still expend more money than you bring in, you’ll find yourself in hot water relatively quickly.
Shutterstock Licensed Photo – By Elena Abrazhevich
Even humble firms can thrive if healthy cash flow is made one of the main tenets of its financial handling. But how do you take care of this? What processes can you automate and staff duties can you train in order to ensure your cash flow stays positive, allowing you to thrive and slowly build your profit margins organically? Well, it’s relatively simple if you systemize your business correctly. Consider the following:
Relatively Strict Payment Deadlines
It can be important to remember that while clients might ask for a lenient repayment deadline for services rendered, you can absolutely ask them to pay on a timeline that is first agreed upon in the contract. However, you might also use a leading invoice finance company to help you overcome this cash flow delay. These services will pay you a large proportion of the invoice pending proof of its existence, and when the client pays will transfer those funds to you. This is very useful, especially because the fees these firms ask for is negligible. Immediate cash flow can be a very useful thing when it comes to your operational funding – who knows when an immediate investment might need to be made to take advantage of an opportunity? With these tips, you are sure to find out.
Reward Immediately Paid Invoices
Asking for money is one thing. Rewarding those who help your cash flow is quite another. This might mean offering discounts the sooner someone pays, even if that’s only by a small margin. It might mean offering access to better services for those who are willing to pay you immediately, such as prioritizing their work first. No matter who you are, it’s not hard to see how rewarding good customer behavior can train them to act like that more frequently over the long term. This will help foster goodwill, and as a result, the business relationship will flourish.
Keep A Cash Reserve
One of the best methods of ensuring your cash flow is healthy is to never let its wellness be a victim of one bad client. Bad clients are sure to exist. With a little-saved security blanket to help you make it through slow payment acceptances, you can be sure that you will have little to worry about from client to client. Ideally, you should have enough to support you even if three of your current clients supports you on payment. This is unlikely to happen, but with this amount of money saved you have a second financial wind to help weather you through the worst of it.
With these simple cash flow tips, your operational funding is sure to be developed correctly and will support you throughout the life of your firm, no matter how new or aged your business is.