Comments on: Cash Flow Advice For Startups

By: Alex Bellinger

Alex Bellinger — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:49:14 +0000

Agreed, Dennis. With Clive’s experience of MBOs, a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for a while, and penchant for pithy advice, I’m sure his appearance on the podcast can only be a matter of time.

By: Dennis Howlett

Dennis Howlett — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 04:08:42 +0000

Alex – you really ought to get Clive on a podcast series – they’ve done some awesome open source work and always have a good story to tell.

What I like about them is they express things in ways us poor accounting types can’t even begin to consider. We just don’t ‘get it’ when it comes to business communication – most of the time…

By: Alex Bellinger

Alex Bellinger — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 21:40:16 +0000

Thanks Clive for really hitting the mark with some very practical advice once again. You’ve got me looking around for a ‘SmallBizPod Recommended Commentor’ logo

By: Clive Birnie

Clive Birnie — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 20:16:09 +0000

I guess truisms are truisms for a reason. Cash is king, god, emperor… profit looks good in the accounts. Cash looks good in the bank or in your pocket.

We always call debtors the week before an invoice is due to make sure there are no problems. If there is a query, you can solve it and still get paid on time rather than waiting until the debt is overdue before you chase. We find that because we watch the detail we get very few late payers and have had only one very small bad debt in 4 years.

Build relationships with your key creditors. Visit regularly, brief them on business progress, brief them when you have published your accounts. Build their confidence and extend your terms.

A simple measure: If your creditor days are longer than debtor days: Good. If its the other way around: Bad. If you don’t know: Find out. Do it now before you take another decision regarding your business.