Day One – Review What’s Going Out and Coming In 

This is the perfect time to analyse your business income and expenditure. Carefully reviewing what you’re paying out for puts you in a good position to make sensible decisions about the things you’re buying on a  regular basis, against the money that’s flowing in. With a year like this one behind you, like many businesses you’ll want to slice as much off your ongoing fixed, variable and operating costs as you can. Do you really need that expensive software that’s coming up for renewal? Can you do more to improve credit control?

It’s wise to review your overall budgets for variable spend:

• Take a look at break-even bearing the current situation in mind
• Make a fresh financial forecast to cover the worst and best-case scenarios for the coming year, then create solid plans to cope with them all so you don’t get any nasty surprises and always know what to do
• Adjust your budgets
• Cut your expenses
• Develop a post-recovery plan so you can move fast when the economy starts to improve
• Shift Your Focus to Cash Flow
• Explore good sources of credit or extended credit terms before you need them, just in case, rather than wait until there’s an emergency