fpdteam

If your business grants a customer time to pay – say 30 days – after the services or goods supplied have been delivered, effectively, your money stays in their bank account for 30 days.

Further, if you have incurred costs regarding a sale, that have to be paid for before your customer settles their bill, you are out of pocket until your account is settled.

Many business owners are driven by sales targets and to meet these targets many are tempted to offer extended payment terms.

There is a well-worn cliché in business that cash is king. Your business only has choices – regarding the sales it makes – once your customers’ money is in your bank account.

The Government has withdrawn draft regulations after consultation with companies raised concerns about imposing additional reporting requirements.

Instead, the Government will pursue options to reduce the burden of red tape to ensure the UK is one of the best places in the world to do business.

Draft regulations published in July would have added certain additional corporate and company reporting requirements to large UK listed and private companies, including an annual resilience statement, distributable profits figure, material fraud statement and triennial audit and assurance policy statement.

This would have incurred additional costs for companies by requiring them to include additional layers of corporate information in their annual reports.

Since July, the Government has completed a call for evidence on existing non-financial reporting requirements, which has identified a strong appetite from businesses and investors for reform, including to simplify and streamline existing reporting.

The Business Secretary has now decided to withdraw these regulations and will be setting out options to reform the wider framework shortly to reduce the burden of red tape on businesses.

The Government remains committed to wider audit and corporate governance reform, including establishing a new Audit, Reporting and Governance Authority to replace the existing Financial Reporting Council. The Government will bring forward legislation to deliver these reforms when Parliamentary time allows.

Most business owners will appreciate the difference between one-off sales, and services that are generally described as recurring.

For example, you may sell a laptop (a one-off sale) and then bolt on a support contract (a recurring sale).

The advantage of recurring income streams is that they not only impact your current sales numbers, but they also help you build a platform of future sales for your business.

Also, the cost of “selling” or acquiring recurring sales is generally lower than securing a one-off sale as you are creating sales revenue into future years rather than just improving your sales figures in the current month. 

Once you have secured the attention of a customer that has purchased their initial goods or services from you, you have completed the hard part – converted a prospect into a buying customer – so don’t be afraid to follow up with cross-sales offers.

For example, when you deliver goods to a customer, do you promote other products that you supply or offer a discount for a repeat order?

Many firms adopt this strategy by:

• Inserting a current publicity leaflet or brochure with the goods physically delivered, or by
• Following up orders by email, a “Hope you found our recent delivery useful…”, with a link to your website and other offers.

In this way you build your relationship and increase footfall.

Three factors influence turnover:

• The number of customers.
• The price of your goods or services, and
• Footfall, the number of times a customer buys from you in a trading period.

In most cases, increasing footfall will have the most impact on turnover. Footfall is the number of times you can encourage customers back to buy more from your business.

So, be on the lookout for ways to encourage your customers back. Once you start thinking in this way, you will be surprised by the number of strategies you could apply.