Cash flow is the lifeblood of your business. If you want to remain profitable, you have to optimize your cash flow. Optimizing your cash flow is critical to the success of your business.
As a business owner, it is easy to overlook your business finances. While we are serving clients and putting out fires, our expenses can get away from us.
It is essential to mitigate unnecessary spending. By incorporating new processes into our workflows, we can keep more cash in our accounts to operate and expand our business.
Here are several ways to optimize your cash flow:
Automate Expense Tracking
It goes without saying, “a penny saved is a penny earned.” If we don’t know where your pennies are going, how are you going to know what you’ve earned?
The answer lies in expense tracking apps. These tools allow you to import documents to track expenses. You can easily upload documents such as invoices and receipts to optimize your expense management.
Companies such as Neat offer mobile scanners and apps for IOS and Android to help you reduce the time it takes to track your expenses.
Sync Accounts
As a business owner, it’s crucial that you keep your business and personal finances separate. There are tax and legal implications for co-mingling your finances that are beyond the scope of this article.
It can be overwhelming to sign in and out of several accounts to monitor your finances. However, there are budgeting tools to help you optimize your expense management.
Mint, a member of the Intuit family, maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax, is a great way to keep track of your personal spending.
Although they do not have a business version, you can still sync your business debit and credit cards while segmenting the expenses.
Their budget tracker and bill pay options are useful tools to help you streamline your expenses.
Apply for a Business Credit Card
Business credit cards are essential tools to help you manage expenses, but it is important that you manage the credit responsibly.
Reach out to your business banker to discuss their current offerings. A business credit card that offers rewards can provide a variety of benefits.
Depending on your business, a store credit card may also be useful. If you use a lot of stationery, consider opening an account with Staples or Office Depot.
If you operate a brick-and-mortar retail store, consider cards from Costco or BJs. These vendors may also offer rewards and benefits for their members.
Keeping an eye on your expenses is no easy task. Work closely with your business adviser or CFO to develop a cash flow management plan.
You also want to make sure you create the flexibility to make opportunistic purchases that will help you grow your enterprise.
With proper expense management, your cash flow will steadily increase and create new opportunities for you to expand.
Black Enterprise Contributors Network