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Top three habits of diligent cash flow management
Even the most qualified financial controllers are constantly looking for ways to improve the way cash flows through their organisation. Cash is the oxygen that fuels every part of your organisation’s day-to-day operations. If your organisation doesn’t have cash in the bank, you can’t hire the best Top three habits of diligent cash flow management personnel and you can’t pay your expenses. And if you can’t pay your expenses, you’re not in business.
No matter how experienced you are at managing cash flow, incorporating good daily habits for healthy cash flow will help you to constantly sharpen your skills and boost your organisation’s cash flow performance. So, here are our top three most essential habits for diligent cash flow management.
Take some cash flow with your coffee
Your organisation’s cash flow directly affects its viability in the long-term. For this reason, you need to be relentlessly focused on your organisation’s cash flow position. Put cash flow front and centre in your mind. Schedule cash flow management into your daily priorities. Write cash flow benchmarks into your organisation’s key performance indicators. Scrutinise and cross-examine those benchmarks persistently.
Make cash flow management a daily habit that you take with your daily morning coffee.
Give some cash flow for lunch
It’s highly likely that every department manager across your organisation needs cold hard cash (in the form of an allocated budget) to do his or her job. Accordingly, they need to have a vested interest in the health of the organisation’s overall cash flow position.
To get cash flow on every manager’s agenda, facilitate a monthly ‘lunch box’ sessions in which attendees can bring their lunch to a workshop-style cash flow management meeting. Share key cash flow reports, explain how the numbers in those reports affect each manager’s budget (and the organisation as a whole) and encourage discussion amongst the group.
This inclusive approach to managing cash flow has a considerable professional development benefit for managers and will, as a result, progressively improve departmental cash flow and budget management across your organisation.
Measure and manage your payment administration time
Hands up who’s heard this buzz-phrase before: ‘What gets measured gets managed’. Most of us have heard it before, but usually it’s a favourite phrase for sales managers – not financial controllers. But, do you really know how much time your finance team spends on managing debits into your organisation?
For a few weeks, set your team the task of keeping a simple record of the time they spend managing debits into the organisation. There are loads of free productivity apps available on the app marketplace that can help you with this; or a simple daily diary will do the trick just as effectively.
Our research tells us that the right payment software could reduce the time that most organisations spend on payment administration and financial reporting by as much as 95 per cent. Consider how systems and software could help your finance team to cut down on payment administration time, decrease payment administrative staffing costs and increase company profits.
Your homework
When it comes to maintaining a healthy cash flow position, incorporating a few good daily habits will help you to get cash flow management onto the organisational agenda and boost its overall cash flow performance. Here’s your homework to get you started:
1. Stay focused on your organisation’s cash flow position – if you have to, schedule some ‘cash flow and coffee’ time into your daily priorities.
2. Identify which managers have an allocated budget and email out that recurring meeting request to your cash flow lunchbox sessions.
3. Ask your finance team members to start keeping a record of the time they spend managing debits into the organisation.
4. Look for ways to improve your team’s efficiency by cutting down on payment administration time.