Does your business need a financial turnaround?
Your business finances lack clarity, you don’t have useful financial information to take decisions or your business faces solvency issues. You might be at the point where you just don’t have the time, energy and/or knowledge to manage both the financial and operational aspects of your business. If this sounds like your business, then you may need a financial turnaround. Alpha Financials suggest a three-staged financial outsourcing process that will help transform your business from a mess into a success:
Stage 1: Conduct a Financial Review to Identify Problems and Opportunities
First, do you have a cost-effective finance service which helps you run your business? This means reviewing your finance systems, procedures, reporting and analysis. A financial review can help analyse the problems within your business and identifies opportunities that you aren’t using to their full potential.
Our highly subsidized Financial MOT service will answer this fundamental question. In addition to identifying weaknesses, it will also pinpoint opportunities for improving financial performance. It has a further benefit of allowing us to work together and develop an effective working relationship at low cost and risk to yourself.
Stage 2: Get back on track and ready to move forward.
Having conducted your financial review, the next step is to agree a priority list of actions to solve the financial problems and deliver the opportunities. It also involves agreeing the type of finance expertise required to deliver them. This will likely involve various levels of part-time input from bookkeepers, accountants or finance directors.
Our bookkeepers will be responsible for all data entry into and sales invoices out of the system, work which typically requires little but frequent and responsive effort. The accountants will undertake the financial reporting with activity usually focused on the reporting periods. Finally, our interim finance directors will be there to provide overall financial guidance and strategy, analyse financial performance and offer wise financial advice in relation to any questions or ideas you may have.
Some activities you can undertake yourself, others remain best undertaken by us, whilst subsequently some of the latter may transfer to you once they’re safely established in order to achieve further efficiencies.
Establishing an effective finance system is critical to understanding the underlying business and thus will evolve over a period of time – this varies between situations, but typically could be from one to six months. At the end of this period, the results will be:
- Relevant financial information consistently recorded accurately, quickly and efficiently. This might not sound exciting but is an important foundation for taking sensible financial decisions
- Reports that provide you with a clear understanding and management of cash, ensuring that you keep on top of things and if relevant to you – keep any threat of bankruptcy at bay. It will also allow you to understand and make sensible decisions about matters like working capital management.
- Forward looking financial review and analysis clearly demonstrating the profitability of different products/services, new sales required to reach breakeven and how much progress has been made towards your overall targets.
The Alpha-Financials flexible approach ensures you get just the right amount of bookkeeping, accounting and finance director resource to deliver these benefits. Most of our financial outsourcing services are ‘frontloaded’, meaning more days will be spent earlier in the process and slowly decrease as the process moves forward. This allows you to see a direct return on your investment as we set up the systems necessary to complete a successful financial turnaround.
Stage 3: Make your finances work for you
At end of stage 2, you will have experienced some of the benefits of our services and will face essentially a “make or buy” decision.
With established and robust financial processes and improved financial insights, decision making and results, you may wish to undertake some of these activities yourself going forwards. Alternatively, having secured these first level improvements, you may wish to press on and secure much more whilst retaining an external expert opinion and access to an experienced financial sounding board.
You may of course wish to combine both approaches and this will vary depending on your individual business and your financial situation.
However structured, the part-time finance service will ensure the full integration between finance and operations and thus will improve the business’s performance, cash flow and profitability. All these elements are vital for sustained, long-term growth and financial stability and will provide your business with the proper infrastructure required for such developments.
Beyond all other requirements, making sure you have the right information at the right time is paramount on any road to recovery. This new found accurate financial information empowers you by producing the so-called ‘balanced score card’ that clearly shows how the business is performing TODAY and a clear path ahead for how it will perform TOMORROW and BEYOND. A financial turnaround starts with access to the right management accountant – Alpha Financials can help you take that first vital step. Fill out the form below to get started with your financial turnaround.
