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4 Ways to Improve Your Business’ Financial Performance

Editor's Note: Take a look at our featured best practice, Objectives and Key Results (OKR) (23-slide PowerPoint presentation). Successful organizations are using Objectives and Key Results (OKR) now. OKRs are efficient way to track company and team goals and measure their progress. It helps every organization's success by cutting out unimportant goals and focusing on what truly is important within the organization. OKR [read more]

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Running your own business can be exciting. You finally get to materialize your vision and offer products that you believe would improve people’s lives. However, over time, you’d have to shift your focus on managing your finances and improving your sales team performance to boost business profit and prepare for stability.

Improving Your Business Financial Position

Businesses have their respective monetary objectives. They also have different approaches toward meeting such goals. Whether you’re realigning your marketing scheme or hiring a fractional CFO services company to analyze your financial report, focusing on making tailored adjustments will certainly improve your business’s position.

If you’ve already modified your business plan, but aren’t satisfied with the outcomes, consider the following ways to improve your financial performance.

Identify Unnecessary Expenses

One important way to improve your financial position is to eliminate unnecessary company expenses. Record your pertinent monthly expenses and see which areas you can gradually cut back or eliminate. Monitoring these will help you gain insights into how your money is being dispensed.

Overhead costs, luxurious amenities, energy-wasting appliances, insurance, and certain facilities may have already been hurting your bottom line. Removing a few of these from the picture can help you know the minimum requirement to ensure efficient operations. This initiative can help you prioritize investing only in office equipment that support team member productivity.

The process might be quite demanding; however, keeping track of your operating costs can help you gain better control of your resources, organize your finances, and stay within your budget.

Leverage On Technology

Manually managing your business’s finances can be time-consuming. The sheer amount of data your staff needs to calculate and process will take up most of their day.

Time is a valuable commodity. On top of this task, your accountants may have other responsibilities they need to tackle. If they’re constantly focusing on these paper works, your business might suffer from project delays.

With this in mind, consider investing in cloud-based solutions to ease their workload and organize your company finances in one system. Sales, expenses, purchases, and other transactions will flow straight to this software so you can check your financial performance and find relevant data in real-time. This system can certainly give you a better view of your current sales and business performance.

Moreover, cloud-based accounting systems can help you design a workflow that immediately pays your vendors each month. This can eliminate the challenge and hassle of processing many bookkeeping data and transactions on your staff’s end. In turn, this can improve their productivity, helping them manage their time and attend to other important matters.

Offer Clients Multiple Payment Options

Clients have certain preferences on how they’d want to pay for their purchases. To help improve your financial performance, make sure to provide customers with an array of payment alternatives. This way, they’ll be more encouraged to buy from your business.

Look into how your customers typically make transactions. From there, you can add appropriate payment options to cater to their requirements. Today, most people opt to pay via credit cards, e-checks, e-wallets, and online payment options, such as PayPal. Thus, take advantage of these and add only those that match your customers’ preferences.

In addition, make sure to have offline payment options available. Despite secure servers, some clients still opt to make transactions to a real person. Offering offline alternatives also gives your business credibility.  This can help improve customer relations and preserve loyalty.

Whether you have an online or physical business, have the said payment choices to maximize every sale you can. In this manner, you’ll be able to reach your target market, improve your sales number, and reach your monthly quota.

Earn Cash From Unwanted Assets

Apart from making it easy for your customers, another way to boost your financial performance is to remove assets that are only taking up space. Examine your current valuables, office materials, and other possessions. You can donate these to charities, sell unused ones, and lease out certain office equipment and unwanted goods. Through this, you’ll be able to earn immediate cash and reduce storage costs.

Creating a Strategic Financial Plan

High sales volume and a positive return of investments are tangible indicators that your company is doing well. With this in mind, it’s crucial to have a strategic plan to improve your business’s overall financial state. With this in mind, it’s crucial to have a strategic plan to improve your business’s overall financial state.

Your financial plan lets you evaluate where and how to implement sustainable changes to knock off your overarching targets. When successful, these initiatives can contribute to the growth and long-term health of your company.

The Takeaway

There’s a plethora of factors that influence your current financial performance. By making necessary adjustments to these areas, you’ll be able to gradually improve your company’s financial position and gain better results.

20-slide PowerPoint presentation
Most organizations only realize 60% of their strategies’ potential value due to issues in strategy development and/or execution. This gap between the strategic plan and actual performance results is known as the Strategy-to-Performance Gap. This presentation explains the [read more]

Want to Achieve Excellence in Performance Management?

Gain the knowledge and develop the expertise to become an expert in Performance Management. Our frameworks are based on the thought leadership of leading consulting firms, academics, and recognized subject matter experts. Click here for full details.

Performance Management (also known as Strategic Performance Management, Performance Measurement, Business Performance Management, Enterprise Performance Management, or Corporate Performance Management) is a strategic management approach for monitoring how a business is performing. It describes the methodologies, metrics, processes, systems, and software that are used for monitoring and managing the business performance of an organization.

As Peter Drucker famously said, "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it."

Having a structured and robust Strategic Performance Management system (e.g. the Balanced Scorecard) is critical to the sustainable success of any organization; and affects all areas of our organization.

Learn about our Performance Management Best Practice Frameworks here.

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About Shane Avron

Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.




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