This week on “Mind Your Own Business” is one of the most under-resourced departments in your business; you want to grow your business, you want lots of profit, you want good cash flow, but do you have all the financial information you need? Is it in the correct format, and do you really and truly understand it?. 

One of the biggest obstacles to many business owners having all the information they need is: Under-Resourced Finance Functions Think about your business; do you have the right resource levels in your finance function?. 

Now, you know that you’ve got the right levels if you’ve got all of the reports that you need, all of your bookkeeping is being done correctly if things arrive on time, if you’ve got time to analyse all of the information if your management account pack is very comprehensive and delivered to you on time if you can sit down with your finance team and understand what’s going on in the business and they have the time to share information and develop the thinking and knowledge around finance with the rest of your business. 

Most businesses are keen on growing, so they invest loads of money in marketing, invest in operations, and invest in sales, but… what about investing in the finance function?. 

Because you need to be able to have the instruments at your disposal to understand if the things that you are doing are actually working, you need to have the metrics in place, to realise that where you spend “X” many pounds or when you make this decision, is it giving you the result that you want?

 Often I think that people see finance as an overhead and, okay, so by accountancy terms, I guess it is an overhead, but to me, it is critical because it gives you the visibility of what’s going on in your business. 

If you find that you shy away from the numbers or find that you don’t get all the information you need, you might find that your finance function isn’t correctly structured or doesn’t have enough capacity to do more than just the basic bookkeeping. 

let me put it to you this way: if you want to grow your business significantly and you don’t have the right finance function alongside, you are going to run into cash flow problems, you are probably going to bleed margins, and you are just not going to be able to understand precisely where the pinch points are and what challenges lie ahead

So if you want to develop your business, you must beef up your finance function. 

If you want to have a much more sophisticated and holistic understanding of what’s going on in your business, you need the right people and the right resource levels in your finance department.

If you’re looking for more small business tips, then we’d like to see you every week on “Mind Your Own Business,”

If you’d like help implementing these tactics then contact Marco Soares for professional coaching for business.