Budgeting and Forecasting
A strong financial forecast is at the heart of any successful Strategic Advising relationship. Many people assume that reporting is the most important, but the forecast provides the roadmap, and therefore the basis for our advisory services.
By comparing the forecast to the accounting actuals, and understanding the variance, we help you to identify problems in your business.
Smallbizsupport- we help companies assess their skills and choose a new direction which utilizes the talents of the team and resources most productively.
Understanding Your Goals
What are the goals for your business? The goals include the obvious ones, like revenue and profit, but they also include their notion of the business opportunity, the value proposition, and the sales and marketing plan to support it. Those pieces will have a direct impact on the revenue potential for the business.
Industry Comparison & Historical Review
The objective here is to qualify the business owner’s goals with real, historical data in order to arrive at reasonable projections. We determine the business’s unique patterns for revenue, gross margin, net profit, and ratios for major expense items to revenue, and then compare those to industry-standard benchmarks for the same data.
Growth Plan
The growth plan should be one that represents the business owner’s goals, their value proposition, their sales, and marketing plan, and can support a positive or neutral cash flow. The end result is a true roadmap for the business. Management decisions should tumble out of the forecast as tasks ready to act upon.
Forecasting is vital for developing strategy. Without it, you’re simply reporting the numbers instead of using them to make predictions. Our expertise with compiling, analyzing and reporting accounting data, enables us to make insightful and actionable financial forecasts.