Managing Your Cash Flow

A healthy cash flow is an essential part of any successful business. Some business people claim that a healthy cash flow is even more important than your business's ability to deliver its goods or services! That may be placing a bit too much importance on your cash flow, but consider this — if you fail to satisfy a customer and lose that customer's business, you can always work harder to please the next customer. But if you fail to have enough cash to pay your suppliers, creditors, or your employees, you're out of business! No doubt about it, proper management of your cash flow is a very important step in making your business successful.

• Understanding cash flow is the first step in effectively managing your cash flow. There's more to it than just a fancy term for the movement of money into, and out of, your business checking account.
• Analyzing your cash flow will help you spot some of the problem areas in the cash flow cycle of your business. As in any good analysis, you need to look individually at each of the important components that make up the cash flow cycle, to determine if it's a problem area or not.
• A cash flow budget is good way of predicting your business's cash flow for the next month, six months, or even the next year.

Included among the Business Tools is a cash flow budget worksheet. The worksheet is an Excel template that can be used in Excel 4.0 or higher. Because it's a template, you can use the worksheet over and over again and still retain an original copy of it. The worksheet is set up to be used for projecting your cash flow for six months. We've formatted the worksheet and put in most of the cash inflow and outflow categories for you. All you have to do is put in your numbers and print it. Once you've downloaded the worksheet, feel free to modify the worksheet to fit your own needs. Enjoy!

• Improving your cash flow will, without a doubt, make your business more successful. Accelerating your cash inflows and delaying your cash outflows are key factors for improving and managing your cash flow. The cash flow budget is also a handy tool to use in the improvement and management of your cash flow.
• Filling your cash flow gaps: from time to time, almost every business experiences the need for more cash than it has. If you find yourself in this position, you may have to borrow money to fill the gap.
• Handling any cash surplus is just as important as the management of money into and out of your cash flow cycle. With the proper management of your cash flow, you might find yourself with a little extra cash, on which you can earn investment income.