Maintain cashflow during the summer holidays

Without a doubt we all look forward to the summer holidays, but how do they impact your ability to maintain cashflow and how can you reduce their impact?

 

Without a doubt we all look forward to the summer holidays, but what do they mean for your cashflow and how can you reduce their impact?

Holidays, particularly the long summer one often hit business through lower sales, fewer staff, patchy stock management, lower revenue and a general slowdown across the company.

So how do you keep things moving and maintain cashflow when staff are off? We all love the holiday season but it does have a major impact on your business and cashflow. With staff, especially those with young families all wanting time off, your ability to find and close sales, and process orders can be greatly affected. Not only that but your clients, suppliers and partners all have the same issues.

So what can you do about it?

• • Business Process Automation

By removing the manual elements of a process, not only does it remove the potential for errors within the process, it can also speed up activities and protect you from staff shortages due to holidays, illness or training needs. This is applicable for almost every business process. In sales, if we can simplify the quotation, order acceptance and processing by using a single system to do it all, not only does it speed up the process, but it also helps to ensure that staff absence does not impact the process.

In addition, having the right system in place allows new products, marketing incentives and price changes to be made available to all easily and quickly, reducing the time to market and preventing delays through the product team not being available to answer questions.

• • Forecasting

Knowing when business is coming in or when suppliers will deliver can be critical to cashflow and unexpected delays can seriously impact your performance. Precise stock level information is also paramount to being able to deliver quickly and on time. Many companies still rely on an individual’s relationship or hands on knowledge to manage these things and as such are unable to perform when these people are away. So having the right system in place which contains all this information on a real-time basis allows accurate forecasting and though that timely cash flow management without relying on people.

• • Invoicing

Even when orders are processed and despatched, they still need to be invoiced and this is often where delays occur due to holiday absences. Whether it’s because the invoice cannot be issued, or the detail cannot be checked when clients raise questions and will not pay without some kind of clarification. Both these mean that cash flow is delayed waiting for staff to return. Of course there is then often a delay until the client pays as part of a normal monthly payment cycle, meaning nearly 2 month may pass before payment appears. Obviously, this could significantly impact revenue and your ability to maintain cashflow.

 

Helping you maintain cashflow

Having the right business system which works with your processes, providing the right information to the people who need it, at the right time, will greatly simplify the whole business and reduce the reliance on staff availability during holidays and other times. Not only that, but it also makes it easy to hire and train new staff as required and maintains a smooth cash flow for the business.

We have helped many companies to correctly design and develop processes and systems which ensure consistent processes and cashflow management by providing the correct tools and information to the right people. We have developed simple sales configuration and order processing tools as well as complex whole business information systems for many clients at affordable prices.

 

Check out these case studies where business systems have greatly enhanced our clients business.