As your business expands globally, your team needs to make sure you can access your financial performance quickly, cohesively, and extensively. Maximizing financial visibility and profitability means developing, assessing, and adjusting your operational processes and goals to ever-changing market requirements. One vital business component will be perfecting your organization’s financial management.
Understanding financial management
The definition of financial management is the strategic practice of establishing, controlling, and monitoring all financial resources to achieve your business goals. This includes many areas of financial functions revolving around profitability, expenses, cash flow, and credit for finance managers on the accounting, accounts receivable, and accounts payable teams.
To build a lucrative financial management business strategy, you’ll need to focus on three fundamental principles:
- The prediction of future financial performances with the help of financial forecasts, tested functions required to drive growth, and the preparation of capital requirements.
- Prioritization of the long-term initiatives.
- Plans tailored to your business model, marketplace dynamics, and organization.
Effective financial management planning provides your financial teams the data they need to support the creation of an interminable business plan—providing informed decisions of where to invest, and the insights necessary to fund those investments, liquidity, and profitability.
The importance of financial management
As the world expands through globalization, you’ll need to keep your business competitive in the marketplace to help provide longevity. And to ensure you produce sales long term, your business needs a form of financial management. Implementing a system to keep track of all streams of revenue is important to your organization to help you:
- Enable future financial planning and acquisition of funds.
- Provide economic stability.
- Increase your organization’s overall value, as well as its profitability.
- Offer defined data that supports critical financial decisions.
- Optimize your workflow to effectively allocate resources and funds.
There are several options a company can use to manage its finances, ranging from an outside consultant to an in-house financial manager. This person or group will need to have full access to your company’s financial past and present, so they’re able to map your future fortuitously.
Strategic vs. tactical management
There are two types of financial management procedures: strategic and tactical. While your financial teammates will use a hybrid of these tactics, it’ll depend on your end goals to determine which procedures they’ll focus on more.
Finance leaders and directors will focus more on a strategic methodology. As you collect data for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and building organizational goals, financial directors at this level plan for future investments and opportunities, helping to build resilience within their company.
For those on a tactical level, financial managers will operate on day-to-day operations—processes like monitoring daily transactions, monthly financial close, and fixed-asset accounting following actual spending. They’d also track the full range of transactions to make sure you’re in compliance as well.
Financial management strategies
Having a solid, agile financial plan that can pivot with your latest business wants, needs, and goals is a critical component to ensuring your company’s long-term success. Having a solid strategy can help accomplish this feat. Four financial management strategies to achieve your goals are:
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Evaluating historical spending and earnings.
Accurate tracking of your past and current expenses is crucial to determining your financial future. Here, you’ll be able to see what plans succeeded and where you need to optimize and improve upon. As your past revenue acts as a success indicator, analyzing this data determines where you might need to make changes to your current performance and targets.
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Building your profit and loss (P&L).
Your income statement, known also as your P&L, acts as a financial summary of your business’s performance. This document notes your monthly income and expenses, alerting your team if you were profitable or operating at a loss. This statement covers sales, costs of goods, expenses, and gross and net profit.
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Setting a budget.
You’ll need to forecast how you plan to spend the company’s money. By setting guidelines on how to manage spending while tracking your financial dependencies, you can make accurate decisions complete with data-driven insights to ensure bottom-line growth. When you set a budget, you’ll need to ask yourself as series of questions, such as what’s the planned revenue for this period and what are the operating expenses?
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Proactively tracking company spending.
Having visibility on every transaction to keep track of how much money is being spent is imperative. Integrating comprehensive software to track your financial analytics provides:
- Real-time visibility into spending to know how much, when, and where.
- Immediate sync with your accounting platforms for ease of use.
- Quick comparison and trend reviews against your current budget and P&L.
- A topline view of all company spends, either by a single user or types of transaction.
You can decide on one these strategies—or a mix of them—to reduce costs and build revenue. Adding a financial management system to your process ensures that you follow multiple strategies easily with minimal errors and manual labor.
Choosing a good financial management tool
When deciding on the right financial management software for your business, you’ll need a tool that’s able to streamline all of your payment collections and ensure compliance with tax and accounting regulations. You’ll also want the software to be able to simultaneously eliminate errors, manual labor, and possible redundancies. Some additional features of a good financial system include:
- Transparency for all sent and received payments.
- Coordinating income statements, expense statements, and balance sheets.
- Balancing multiple accounts and being to locate them easily.
- Ensuring data integrity and security.
- Keeping track of all liabilities and up-to-date records.
- Maintaining a complete and accurate audit trail.
By having all of this budgetary data available, you’re able to make sound decisions that’ll positively impact your business. A financial management system that can provide transparency and flexibility to accommodate changes means long-term sustainability.
Start managing your financial data with Dynamics365Finance
Enable your organization to have full visibility into spending and costs by integrating a predictive and proactive financial management tool. Adding a financial management software tool to your process ensures you eliminate human error and tedious work processes while boosting productivity.
Dynamics365 Finance helps integrate key components with minimal disruption, ensuring real-time, high-level visibility into your organization’s financial state, while facilitating day-to-day operations. By providing a full range of financial data, you’ll have the information you need to make sound, data-driven decisions, optimize your internal and external operations, reduce costs, and protect your revenue.
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