How to better keep track of your company’s inflows and outflows

Do you need confidence in taking daily decisions for your business? A careful monitoring of your inflows and outflows will give you more control over your company and trust that tomorrow will be fine. 

Get rid of the ever stressful question Do I have enough money to pay salaries this month? and take informed decisions for your business. Here’s how to do that.

Check all your data sources

Consolidate your inflows and outflows from all the sources. You’ll have to add the data from your bank statements and cash transactions for sure, but see if you have business operations from other sources too (e.g. payment processor reports, e-wallets, etc). 

Make sure that at this point you have all money coming in and out of your business gathered in the same place.

Use categories to organise your inflows and outflows

Carefully organise your transaction history in order to better understand what are your main costs and sales. The granularity of your category plan should be set according to your particular needs. More detailed categories will require a little more time from your side, but will also offer more information about your daily business operations.

Check your financial history and look for any particular trends

Once you organised your inflows and outflows on specific categories, take some time to analyse it. Check the cash fluctuations over time and see if you can identify any seasonality of your business. Can you remember the specific factors which might influence it?

There are companies that perform better during winter months compared to summer or that are highly influenced by specific events which take place during a year. The information about seasonality will become a groundwork for your financial planning and will help you stay away from cash flow hiccups. 

Plan your next expected inflows and outflows

It might sound complicated, but cash flow planning is not that hard to manage. Especially if your history is carefully organised and updated.

Where should you start? From all recurring payments which have a fixed or slightly different amount month by month. Some examples here are rent, utilities, salaries for a specific period, employment taxes and so on.

After you finish with this, go on with the variable costs such as advertising costs, sales costs, taxes, etc.

Done with future costs? Then it’s time to take care of your predicted inflows. Start by adding incomes that you are most sure of such as an issued invoice that hasn’t been paid yet or the value from an already signed contract. Can your company survive only with this cash for the next 3 to 6 months? Complete your inflow planning with estimations for the next period that are in accordance with the evolution you want for your business to have.

If you sell products and do not work with payment terms, then use your historical income values to plan your inflows. Check the collections for the lasts months, but also take into consideration any growth plans you might have for your business.

Refresh and adjust your forecasts

Don’t forget about your business forecasts! 

Come back and check your financial planning periodically, refresh your existing amounts to reflect your business reality. The more frequent you do this, the easier it will be to have control over your business finances and the investments required for your growth. 

This habit will significantly reduce your worries about the future of your company and will help you to sleep better at night.

Enjoy your holiday and let us help with cash flow management

If you want to fully benefit from your holiday this summer then stop losing time in Excel and consider using ThinkOut, the cash flow management platform for entrepreneurs.

How can ThinkOut offer more free time for yourself?

• You replace manual data import and aggregation with automation. ThinkOut connects with your banks and automatically imports the transaction history from your accounts 

• You significantly reduce the amount of time invested in data management. The categorisation engine learns from your past actions and takes into account your edits for future associations

• You no longer need to check multiple sources to get an idea about your finances. You added a cash prediction in ThinkOut, imported the actual inflow from your bank account, match them and done – you’re always up to date with what happened in your company financially speaking and what you should expect from the future

• You build your budget for the next trimester and come back only when you need to verify your estimated vs. actual amounts

Try ThinkOut for free for the next 30 days and see how it can help you with cash flow management. If you have any questions about the platform or need a free demo, drop us a line at support@thinkout.io.

If you’re interested in cash flow management and planning, continue reading about how to build financial forecasts for your business or how to face change with cash flow control.