Working with a Virtual Chief Financial Officer

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The beginning of a new financial year is a common time for people to reconsider their approach to their business.

With the help of a Virtual CFO, you can reduce your stress, regain control and optimise your business. The ability to have total control and visibility over your finances is of paramount importance and here is an outline of how OBT can help:

• Cashflow Cycle Chart to help you understand where your cash is tied up in the business.
• Sales Funnel Calculation to identify how many leads your business needs to generate, therefore, how many emails/brochures need to be sent to generate sufficient leads and, in turn, generate sufficient contracts with customers.
• Debtors’ Days Outstanding Calculation. This is one of the biggest single issues confronting Australian business, yet many business owners don’t know how to calculate debtors’ days outstanding.
• Debtors’ Reduction Program to help you identify who you’re going to approach to achieve some significant reduction in your debtors.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and ratios as they apply to budgets and cash flow forecasts.
• Bank Liaison. Are you doing this effectively? Are you making sure that you’re fulfilling the bank communication requirements?
• Bank Covenant Checklist. Many people overlook the fact that, in most bank loan documents, there are a series of covenants for which you have signed and that banks are monitoring. How are you going on the gross profit percentage targets, net profitability targets, etc that had been set by the bank?
• Pricing Calculators to assist with setting prices (retail, trades and professions). Our system takes into account all of the operational activities within a business.
• Benchmarking business performance as well as being aware of the ATO’s benchmarking requirements.
• Management Ideas Calculations. They all require a financial input, so we are happy to get your phone calls asking, “Can you have a look at this and tell us whether that will work?” “Is there a better way to undertake that production than what were’ currently doing?”
• Risk Management looking at insurance covers, preparation for the PPSR and/or Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) issues or exposure.
• Management Accounts to ensure that accounts are being prepared in a manner that the management team would understand. Not a set of financial accounts that are ultimately submitted to the ATO, but a set of accounts that are dissected into every operation within the business, not all lumped together in one Profit & Loss Account.
• Job Costing System so that the results of every job can be disclosed to the business owners(s) and the management team. What follows from there is the tailoring of the KPIs for the business to dovetail into those management accounts and to make sure that the management team clearly understand what the KPIs mean. From an accounting point of view, there’s nothing worse than to spend hours preparing reports, KPIs and ratio analysis and then no one reads them or understand them.
• Training for the management team if ever required.
• Identifying Grants that could be secures to improve skills and knowledge in the management of a business by training key stakeholders on how to understand the financial accounts and the KPIs.
• Regular Reporting to show management very clearly how they’ve traded in the previous period.
• Debtors and Stock Management. This is a huge area. With a lot of money tied up in businesses, small/medium enterprises need accounting input on how to monitor the investment.
• Raising Capital. Are you directing the business into an investment readiness state? As their CFO, OBT can help you continue along that path because businesses should be continually looking at how they can make themselves more attractive to investors.

Of course, business plans are also very important and can also be included as part of our CFO service.

The reality is that many businesses don’t have control or visibility over their finances. Instead, it can often be more of a conundrum dominated by their financial team, bookkeeper or accountant. While this is a common occurrence, it doesn’t have to be the case for your business.

If you have any questions on how OBT’s Business Solutions team can assist you by providing VCFO advice, please contact us on 5462 2277.