Personal money management is tough enough, but when you try to manage money for an entire business or brand, things become even more complicated and convoluted. And that’s why there are specialized tools and organizational tips specifically for business finance managers.
Five tips in particular might include hints like making sure that you shorten your selling cycles, use social elements for natural brand promotion, get feedback from early adopters, keep personal and professional finances separate, and use project management software to help synchronize all of your business communications with respect to money flow.
Shorten Your Cycles
A recurring problem in business finances happens when financial cycles take too long to complete. You’ve got the sale. You’ve shipped the product. The customer may have even scheduled the payment. But you don’t have the money yet, and you have to crunch the numbers anyway. Because of how quarterly cycles reports work, this can look really bad on your financial records. Which is why figuring out how to shorten those cycles, and tighten up the time between phases, is going to be the goal of any small business.
Use Social Elements For Natural Promotion
Another good tip for smart money management is to try to get as much natural promotion as possible for free. And in this day and age, that means using social media to benefit your brand. And what that process essentially comes down to is how well you learn to discuss your product in public without looking like you’re trying to push it on people. The better you are with your words, and the natural order of discussion, the more money you’re going to save on other types of advertising.
Use Feedback From Early Adopters
What’s your relationship with early adopters? Are you sending out early versions of your product to them to see what they think? Because when they’re happy, that’s when you know that you can move on to the general public. Your money isn’t going to come from the early adopters. But your money is going to come from the time period after the early adopters are willing to talk about your business.
Keep Your Finances Separate
One mistake that many people make with their newly formed businesses is that they don’t keep their personal and business finances separate. This can be one of the worst decisions to make from a money management standpoint, because all of the data will be mixed together, disallowing you from making accurate decisions about basic things like budgets.
Use Project Management Software
Most modern project management software will have entire sections showcasing money management. This can be personalized on a employee by employee basis, or can also show a bird’s-eye dashboard view of entire projects at a time, and the resources they contain.