Properly managing your finances is key to stability and ensuring your business won’t fail. Proper money management ensures you pay all your bills, pay yourself, keep a good credit score, and plan with effective budgets.
Many big businesses have entire departments dedicated to managing their money, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn from them. Looking for advice on how to manage your company’s finances? Learn from the best by discovering how big businesses keep their finances in check.
Pay Yourself
Big businesses pay themselves and their stakeholders instead of putting everything they earn back into their daily operations. While having additional capital can help your business grow, key players must be compensated accordingly, especially investors who have set terms with the business and require prompt payments.
Paying yourself is important because if the business fails, you’ll be left with nothing. So instead, give yourself a salary instead of putting everything back into the business so you can start saving.
Invest in Growth
Big companies always have money set aside for growth and finding new opportunities to scale the business. So always look toward the future when it comes to your finances. Small businesses that want to continue growing by getting the top professionals and innovating must invest in the future.
Investing in growth may look different, depending on your industry. However, you should always strategize to find the right growth initiatives that can help you earn more money, hire more employees, and boost your brand reputation.
Loans
Big businesses aren’t afraid to use loans when they need them. Loans give businesses an influx of capital they can use to fund growth opportunities. While loans can be scary, they’re often necessary to help boost growth and help businesses reach long-term goals. Business loans can help you do everything from developing new products to growing your team or simply give you a boost in cash flow for bigger projects.
Maintain Good Credit
The most successful businesses maintain good credit and pay their debts and other bills on time. You may need to take out loans or rent larger office space as your business grows. Unfortunately, with bad credit, simple business functions, such as finding a new lease, can be difficult because landlords must ensure you can pay your rent.
Additionally, lenders like to see businesses with good or better credit to prove their ability to repay the loan. Keeping your business in good credit standing and paying your debt as soon as possible is key to success so that lenders don’t come knocking on your door with higher interest rates and late fees.
Billing Strategies
A billing strategy helps avoid late payments from clients and partners. In an ideal world, all businesses, no matter their sizes, will have clients that pay their invoices on time. Unfortunately, that’s not the case even for the largest, most successful businesses. Every business must deal with late payments from time to time, but payments are necessary to manage cash flow to ensure you can afford to function on a daily basis.
If you can’t collect payments from clients or customers, you might have to think of a new billing strategy that will entice them to pay on time. For example, large businesses must avoid cash tied up in unpaid invoices, so if they have late-paying customers, they may change the payment terms by offering the client a discount when they pay early and a fee for late payments.
Tax Payments
Large businesses pay quarterly estimated taxes just like any other business. However, they may choose to spread out their payments monthly instead of quarterly to give them the best idea of how much their business spends every month.
Treating tax payments like just another monthly operating expense can help avoid lump sums paid every quarter, promoting a better flow of cash. In addition, businesses of all kinds can use professional tax software to manage their tax payments to understand how much they need to pay each month, quarter, and year.
Monitoring the Books
Big businesses must constantly monitor their books and business bank accounts to understand how much they’re spending every day, week, month, quarter, and year. Many large corporations have a financial department with bookkeepers, accountants, and other staff to monitor the books, ensuring every cent is accounted for.
Focus on Return on Investment
Successful businesses focus on expenditures and return on investments (ROIs). Measuring how much certain expenses help them earn them a sense of the different types of services and products that aren’t worth the investment.
On the other hand, not tracking ROI can result in the loss of money on bad spending habits and investments, so it’s important to know where your money is going and how it’s working for you. If investments aren’t paying off, cut back and spend more money on the initiatives, products, and services working for your business.
Plan Ahead
Successful businesses plan as far ahead as possible to help them budget and know where to invest money. Businesses that can look ten years into the future can start budgeting early, even if they don’t have all the money they plan to spend yet.
While planning ahead can be difficult because no one can predict the future, staying on top of industry and customer trends can help you understand how your business may change over the next few years, allowing you to allocate your spending effectively.
Use Financial Analytics
Investing in financial analytics helps businesses predict cash flow for the future, allowing them to budget effectively and understand how much they’ll have to spend later on. In addition, analytics provide businesses with real data to make better spending decisions, shaping their financial strategies through facts rather than guesswork.
Analytics helps businesses evaluate costs and benefits, ROI, and forecast their future needs to better understand where they’ll need to spend money in the future to remain successful.
Final Thoughts
Big, successful businesses invest time, energy, and money into managing their finances to ensure the success and growth of their companies.
However, building a successful business from the ground up will be nearly impossible if you’re not willing to dedicate these resources to understanding your finances and spending wisely.