Business Planning:- Monitor

Step 9

Monitor your progress

You can have the best business plan in the world, but if you are not monitoring your progress, you might as well not have started.

Once again it is about clarity on your progress. When you’re head down and bum up, you sometimes wonder if it is all worth it. Taking time out to work to track your progress can be uplifting.

From a cash point of view, you should be monitoring your cash position and updating your budget on a monthly basis. Concepts Cashmanager is a wonderful tool, not perfect but pretty good. You should learn how to use it if you don’t already or at least something similar.

Successes will be happening all the time. Take time out to acknowledge and celebrate the significant ones.

Electronic Cash Books

I know some multimillion dollar turnover businesses that have no idea what their cash position is expected to be at the end of the financial year. Yet they have to make spending decisions constantly. This is fine if they have a strong business, and some of them do. Those who don’t, need to pay closer attention to their actual position and budgeted position.

Electronic cash books have a lot to offer, and there are a few choices available. From our experience, Concepts Cashmanager is the most popular, and probably the most appropriate for the rural market. Possibly the dearest, but still value for money.

We like the fact that the coding is letter based rather than number based. It has the best budgeting tool, and generates some good reports.

Bank Link is also popular, and is easy to use for cash book coding. However it is not a rural based product and we don’t like the budgeting ability or the reports that are able to be produced.

Remember though you don’t have to do it yourself. Your time may be better placed working on strategy, or coaching your staff, rather than pouring over cash books.

What is important, is that regardless of who does it, you should:

have a full understanding of the invoices being paid each month,

understand the variance between the monthly budgeted and actual result,

and update your budget on a monthly basis.

Timing issues, the impact of weather, production and commodity prices will all conspire to give you a false budgeted result unless you update your budget each month. With practice and good use of technology, it won't take long, once you have your initial budget completed.