Creating clarity on business goalposts
We recently worked with a client who was flying blind. They hadn’t set any financial goalposts for the year, and didn’t have a clear picture of what winning looked like for their business.
We worked with them to understand what was holding them back, articulate what success looked like, created a roadmap to get them there, and helped with implementing the solutions to make it all happen.
The end result? Clear and relevant financial business goals easily visible within their financial reporting platform, upskilled team members able to generate meaningful business reports, and a clear line of sight to what’s winning.
The details:
Project Name: Business Budgeting Templates & Implementation
Now: The client hadn’t set any financial goalposts for the year. Financially flying blind, they were also going through a growth phase so it was incredibly important for them to have clear visibility of costs, and the income levels they would need to meet certain targets. They had no business budget in place - which meant they had no roadmap to guide them towards their growth goals. While management recognised the need to formalise their business budget and processes, the team involved in the reporting processes lacked the knowledge of why having a budget is so important to a business, how to create a budget and set that up in the reporting platform, and what other factors you need to consider when planning and implementing a business budget.
Where: First and foremost our client wanted to upskill their team on the importance of budgeting, and get them involved in building a budget template line-by-line that would clearly show variances or when things were going off track. They also wanted support in creating an accurate starting point for actual comparisons and modelling scenarios, and wanted to be able to run reports at click of a button to compare actual performance to budget.
How: With a clear understanding of the client’s pain points and where they wanted to get to, we started this project by reviewing any existing budget calculations. We then ran a workshop with the client and relevant team members to educate them on the purpose and importance of budgeting, how to create a budget, best practice, and additional considerations. We then got in to the detail for the client, working through the costs of the business line-by-line to create estimated amounts for the various business categories. During this process we identified a number of incorrectly allocated expenses, which would have distorted the accuracy of any financial reports. We assisted in correcting these items, and provided feedback and support to the bookkeeper to reduce the errors going forward.
After conducting some high level cross checks and identifying a number of outdated expenses that could be removed to reduce costs, we were then able to calculate potential capacity and income targets across the business.
Following feedback from the team, we imported the budget into Xero, their cloud accounting platform, and created some quick-access comparison reports that the team could easily access to see how they were tracking towards their new targets.