With the end of the financial year fast approaching, businesses should get organised and reconsider their practices, so they can plan for success.
Retaining customers, remaining financially solvent, and expanding and diversifying are key challenges for most businesses. Using the new financial year to reassess structure and cut back on non-performing areas will let leaders gain fresh perspectives on the future of their business. If there’s ever a good time to do this, it’s at the beginning of a financial new year.
Here are four tips for businesses to gear up for a successful new financial year:
1. Assess finances
Before developing a financial strategy, managers must first understand the company’s financial position. An accountant or book keeper can help review finances, get accounts in order and prepare the tax return. Based on this information, business leaders can achieve greater leverage and control over business expenditures, and consider how to give employees a better way to manage expenses quickly and efficiently.
2. Automate where possible
Human error due to manual processes is a primary problem in managing accounts effectively. Research shows that 80 per cent of organisations still rely on employee spend data that is manually entered by employees.* An automated solution can significantly reduce mistakes, with its built-in error-checking functionality and ability to provide organisations with accurate financial reports at the touch of a button. This leads to more accurate, faster reporting, which, in turn, lets businesses respond to issues sooner and more effectively.
3. Keep on track
A plan for continual growth should outline the business’s goals and a strategy for how to achieve them within a certain timeframe. The plan should include ways to better understand customer pain points and motivations because business growth largely depends on their satisfaction. Using the support and feedback of customers, partners and employees about how to improve the current offering can help develop solutions and services for the new financial year.
4. Put customers first
To develop a competitive edge, customer needs must always take first priority. A deep understanding of customers’ needs, empowered by data, should sit at the centre of any effective business strategy.
A lot of businesses roll into each new financial year without introspection, often repeating errors. Through careful planning and management, businesses can dramatically improve their performance. Business leaders should start the new financial year by considering how to improve business processes to lead them to success.
* Forrester Research, The Power of Real-Time Insight, 2014
Matt Goss, ANZ Managing Director, Concur
