There is a lot of talk going on at the moment about the potential of a second wave of the Coronavirus here in the UK. This could potentially lead to another national lockdown, which in turn could mean that you will have to close your business for a second time in 2020.
But how will your business survive this? With top notch planning that's how!
I am more specifically talking about cash flow planning. I have talked about this before and we have a great podcast on this, which I highly recommend that you go and watch here (shameless plug).
So, what is cash flow planning? It is pretty simple really and it is in the title, it is all about planning how much cash you will have in your bank account at a certain period of time. This could be for a few months or even up to 12 months in advance.
To do this, all you need to do is take all of your opening cash balances, add your cash in and then minus your cash out. This process can be made really simple if you would like a quick cash flow forecast or it can be done by us in depth to ensure it is extremely accurate and reflects everything that is going on. You can even use cash flow planning to drill down into your cash flow balances on a day to day basis or even week to week.
Cash flow planning gives you an amazing insight on where your business is going to be in the future (even if it is the next week) in regard to the cash available to your business. Whether you are a big business or self-employed, cash flow planning will help you to plan for all eventualities to ensure there are no unexpected surprises.
With this kind of planning you are able to plan for all scenarios like, zero income due to business closure and even big expenses like the potential of any redundancies, having to buy more PPE and the extra costs of ensuring your business is Covid-19 secure.
OK, so with all this talk of cash flow planning, I am sure you are wondering where to start and do you have the time to get this sorted? Well there is no need to worry about that! We have already sent all of our clients a copy of our cash flow spreadsheet which you can download below. ALSO, if you are one of our QuickBooks online users then we can give your Fluidly cash flow forecasting app for FREE. Yes, you read that right free.
Fluidly connects directly with QuickBooks online and brings in all of your up to date data and even creates a basic cashflow forecast for you from the data within QuickBooks. All you will need to do is tweak the base forecast to reflect exactly how your company works and BOOM, you are up and running with a three-month cash flow forecast and it is all free. It really is that simple!
Fluidly also has a built in planning tool where we can help you to look into any eventualities like no income or having to make someone redundant and we can then predict how long you cash is going to last, or what changes you may need to make.
If you would like to get set up with Fluidly then please contact us soon so we can get it set up for you! It is an app that we highly recommend that you use alongside your current offering of QuickBooks online.
If I haven't managed to convince you yet that you should get some cash flow planning sorted, then you can book a call in with me here so we can discuss exactly why you need
to be doing cash flow forecasting.
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