How do you keep an eye on cash flow in your company?

[DavidBistiak]

Hey Guys,

I work as a Team Leader in a Software House (16 employees, AR $575,000), where we create mobile apps and software for clients. I am really interested in how you keep an eye on cash flow in your companies. Not from an accounting point of view, but rather a high level perspective from CEO, Team Leader and Finance Manager.

As a Team Leader I am responsible for achieving positive cash flow and employee management in which team has to have enough long term tasks. I don’t issue the Invoices, but I need to know about the actual and planned company numbers (balance, income, expenses and profit). I track these numbers (every entry) in Google Sheets. But It’s really annoying.

I don’t want to create Invoices. I don’t have time for that. I want to track company numbers the simplest way possible. I want to focus on my job, business and planning.

• Do you have similar problem or need with Invoices?
• How do you track your company numbers?
• What is your company's core business and revenue?

I really appreciate anyone who will join this discussion.

 

[djbaxter]

I don't have an answer for you but it's an interesting question.

 

[Bruno Moreira-Guedes]

Hello!

I was a partner at a software house a long time ago, a small one with a revenue of around 200,000 per year and about 10 people working on it at that time. One of my former partners has another software company and provided us with their software, which in my opinion was very poor.

To be honest, I had no problem using Microsoft Excel to manage it instead of using his software. Once you have it well structured, and if you don't have a huge number of transactions (i.e. if you have 50 large contracts instead of 10,000 small ones), you can achieve it pretty well by just importing your invoices and other accounting data there in a matter of some clicks and copy/paste (or having someone from administrative staff to feed this for you). If you have access to your accounting database and have some good views for that task, you can do it pretty easy by connecting Excel directly to your management system (one could save a LOT of time by doing that, if you have a huge volume of transactions).

I have created a good workbook where data were imported and structured in an accounting perspective, but was processed to provide high level reports. Usually, I did all the planning in this datasheet too, so I could easily compare planned vs. realized, and easily find where the "gap" is.

Anyway, I think there are much better approaches. I have a neighbor who works with BI, and he does really impressive stuffs with Microsoft Power BI. If I had such resources at hand at that time, I would likely use something like this (even though I would have to hire someone to assist me).

Another choice is Balanced Scorecard. There is a plenty of tools available for that, including tools integrating strategic planning to BSC. Some of them could really communicate with your software. I don't recommend all their strategic planning tools (i.e. SWOT Analysis in this kind of software is always poor, and budgeting is normally missing).

Regardless of the tool of your choice, keep in mind that what you have to refine the data in a way to easily and visually see what is going on, and you also need something to "closely inspect" it when things don't meet the planned set .