Cash Survival Strategies

Cash is the lifeblood of your business. It enables you to pay the bills and keeps your business operational. While you always need to have cash reserves on hand for emergencies, if your business is in an expansion phase, you may need additional cash reserves to cover your costs.

If you've noticed your cash levels are decreasing each month, you'll likely need to take some constructive steps to get back on track. Here are some strategies to keep your business cash positive and ensure your business remains viable.

Reduce unnecessary costs

There are probably numerous expenses in your business that you could do without and now is a perfect time to see what you can cut. Audit your expenses to identify costs you no longer need or could negotiate better terms on. There could be:

• Subscriptions to software you no longer use that are costing you money each month, quarter or year.
• Lower-rate fixed service plans you could switch to if you don't need all the functionality.
• Excess inventory that you're paying money to store.
• Ineffective advertising costs if you're unsure they relate directly to sales.
• Anything you could do yourself if you really needed to.

Go through the last few months of invoices and credit card statements (yours and your employees) to see what could be eliminated entirely or reduced to save you money.

Invoice immediately

Make sure all your work is invoiced for as soon as possible. For larger customers, you should try to get into the customer's payment cycle or apply to be an approved supplier as soon as possible. If you are asked to do more than the original quote, then it is reasonable to negotiate additional payments. This makes it important to specify in the initial sales contract exactly what you will deliver.

If you haven't already, sign up for accounting software to make it easier to send invoice reminders.

Raise cash quickly

If you need to improve your cash flow temporarily, adjust your sales and marketing plans by giving customers motivation to purchase in advance, offering early-payment incentives such as discounts and focusing your marketing on short-term lead generation and sales rather than longer term objectives like brand recognition.

Be aware that short-term incentives should be just that: short term. Offering discounts and incentives to ease your cash flow is fine but will erode your profits in the long run. Have a plan for executing short-term strategies and ending them as soon as you're cash positive again.

Request progress payments

When negotiating new contracts with customers, be aware of setting payment terms that help your cash flow, such requiring as deposits or progress payments.

• Negotiate stage payments for contracts that take a long time to complete.
• Include a regular timetable for the customer to pay invoices as part of any agreement.
• Agree on clear milestones for the work to be completed to reduce the chance of the customer disputing any invoices.

Being paid throughout the course of a project keeps your cash flow consistent, enables you to pay your bills regularly and ensures you get paid for the work you've completed.

Manage inventory carefully

If you hold inventory, then tighter controls can release substantial sums of money, which can help your cash flow. If possible, hold just enough inventory to service your customers on an ongoing basis. Identify seasonal peaks and troughs and adjust inventory levels accordingly. Implement just-in-time inventory ordering so the cost of warehousing is put back on your suppliers. Sell off any slow-moving, old or obsolete inventory to raise cash. Even offering it at a deep discount gives you money you need, especially if that inventory was unlikely to sell.

Credit control

An efficient credit control system speeds up your cash collection and reduces bad debt. Some suggestions:

• Credit check all customers before you extend credit terms.
• Control how much credit you provide and to which customers. Consider using credit scoring systems and setting appropriate credit limits for all customers.
• Avoid giving any customer more credit than you could afford to lose if the sale turned into a bad debt.
• Send out invoices immediately after you have supplied the goods or service. Confirm that all the invoice details are correct and that there will be no problem paying it by the due date.
• Monitor late payments and chase them up methodically, with the largest debtors first.
• If you intend to charge interest on late payments this must be stated in your terms of trade.

Next steps

Once you've identified a cash flow issue, it's important to take steps to get your cash reserves back on track. Identify unnecessary costs and eliminate or reduce them, ensure your invoicing systems are efficient and properly managed, and consider charging deposits or progress payments on your work if you're not doing so already.