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Not everyone stuck with the job of controlling their company’s finances naturally slips into the CFO’s role for their business. In fact, a lot of business owners would rather delegate that job to someone with a little more experience and financial expertise. From setting up your businesses curbside trash service to learning the QuickBooks check printing procedure, you will find that being at the wheel of your company requires a genuine understanding of how to handle the proverbial purse strings. Here are a few tips to help you get started successfully managing your company’s financial situation.
Setting Employee Wages
When it comes to setting employee wages, you must gain a genuine sense of how much your employees’ work is worth. If you have six employees earning 15-dollars-per-hour, for example, then you are saying that collectively the amount of work they produce is worth 90-dollars-per-hour. For each eight-hour day, this means your company is spending 720-dollars per day on its employees. As you look closer at your company’s financial situation, you may start to see that a more realistic rate of pay for your employees is 12-dollars-per-hour for the amount of work they produce. The more realistic you are about paying your employees a wage that fits their rate of production, the more your employee pay scale will fit within your company’s long-term operating budgetary projections.
Ordering Checks
When it comes to paying the bills for your company, you will want to use custom checks. When you order checks that work with programs like QuickBooks and Quicken, you want them to contain your company logo and demonstrate a professional look. Using checks designed to work with financial management software will also help to ensure that printing compatibility will not be an issue. In addition, having physical checks will supply you with a hard-copy paper-trail for financial accounting purposes.
Rent and Lights
If you budget correctly, your company should always be able to handle the cost of monthly rent and keeping the lights burning. Many times an inexperienced financial officer will get caught up in biting off more than the company is able to chew. When the bills get out of hand, it becomes difficult to pay for rent and lights. This means that you need to be financially savvy enough to let the numbers dictate what your company is truly able to afford to do, financially speaking, and operate within budget accordingly.
Dealing with Vendors
When it comes to ordering products and supplies, your company needs to be very careful to order from a vendor that is offering a reasonable price for items being purchased. Many vendors are in the business to make money, regardless of how this impacts your company’s bottom line. For this reason, it is critical that you shop around for the best price you can get without sacrificing quality. Getting the cheapest price you can is nice on paper; however, this is not the case if it ends up costing your company in perceived quality or reputation. Being too cheap will sometimes hurt you financially. Being reasonably cheap and maintaining quality in the process is where genuine financial smarts begin to take hold.
Conclusion
When taking control of your company’s purse strings, you will find that there will be many factors that involve hard financial decision making. If you want your business to survive, it is up to you to make the decision to operate within budget. Failure to follow this simple rule has been the demise of the majority of companies that fail. Companies that operate by the numbers and learn to function within budget, these are the companies that generally stand the test of time.
