I was interested to read this week the latest “Money Matters” report from Xero. This report is stated as “navigating the impact of economic conditions on the cash flow of Australian small and medium-sized businesses”. The findings were not particularly surprising to anyone working with small business in 2023. That is, 60% of small businesses have reported cash flow issues in the past year. With the scarcity of labour and the upward inflationary pressure on wages, products, and services, it isn’t surprising that small business is feeling the heat in their bank balance. Reportedly, one third of small business owners polled are justifiably worried about their financial health.
So, what are small businesses doing to combat cash flow issues? Xero reported the following:-
These are all definitely great steps in improving cash flow. When things are tight, success in business always comes back to just one thing; analysing your financial data and making timely adjustments to improve your results. But the problem is, this important work also uses up the most limited resource of every business owner, time! Trying to find a way to automate the data analysis quickly and cost effectively is the challenge.
This gets even more complicated for a trusted advisor like Appy Books, who are helping a whole stable of small businesses to hang on in the tough times and then thrive. Data needs to be up to date and analysed quickly so clients can be advised on the changes they need to make today to improve their cash flow tomorrow. It was exactly this dilemma that led me to develop our KPI dashboard, Appy Dash earlier this year.
Appy Dash began life as a tool to assist Appy Books in providing clients with even better service in these financially tempestuous times. It can simply be described as a series of dashboards containing the most important financial KPIs to measure today’s business performance of all our clients. The delightful spin off of Appy Dash has been that it has given our clients the ability to “fish” for themselves. That old adage of “If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime” has never been more appropriate in business. Empowering clients to understand their own cash flow position by using Appy Dash, then making changes to improve it has been a game changer. Clients are informed and engaged, and they can easily track those four items Xero highlighted in the ”Money Matters” report without using up their precious time. And it has been proven that there is always a much bigger likelihood of business success when the owner, the bookkeeper and the accountant are all looking at the same data and are pulling together. In other words, teamwork rocks!
If you want to take a look at the Xero report mentioned above, check it out at the link below.
https://www.xero.com/au/resources/cash-flow/
If you would like to discuss how you can get Appy Dash working for your business or for your practice, shoot me an email on info@appydash.com.au
Stay cash flow positive and stay ‘Appy!
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