What's New At Credit Matters?

The focus of the July newsletter is all about offering ideas and questions for consideration in the new financial year, the like of which many people have never seen before. The world has changed dramatically post COVID and yet many businesspeople, owners and managers are still operating their businesses according to pre COVID business philosophies and thinking.

The attachments with this newsletter are from RSM regarding their workshops on the 2023 CFE Exam Review Courses, another from Absolute Facts re due diligence, and another from Barry Urquhart regarding interesting information regarding online sales information.

Kim is available to help with your questions and concerns if you need any assistance, and as always, the first chat is always free of charge or obligation.

Quote Of The Month

“Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.”— Benjamin Franklin

Monthly Business Observation

Let us be honest, operating and managing a business is never easy. As a result, all too often management focus on the big factors of business, for instance on expenses which may lead to the loss of large amounts of money in the short term. Rarely does management however look at the expenses which cause a small amount of loss repeatedly over the long term.

However, as this month’s quote points out, a small expense repeated over time, and often enough, is just another way of forcing a business to close down, or reduced cashflow and profits.

In my experience, the most damaging of all losses over the long term are those related to a lack of customer service and repeated customer related credit claims. These expenses, which are usually dollar small in many cases, are ignored and treated as just another business expense. If there is no action on these expenses, it doesn’t take long before they become a significant cost and profit robbing burden for the business.

When customer service is treated as a cost only factor of business, management often fails to resource the area properly, plus respect the issues raised by customer service employees about ongoing problems.

Credit and accounts receivable are also often treated just as cost centres and likewise, and can therefore be under resourced and/or their suggestions about issues are ignored and disrespected. As a result, when customer credit claims are processed slowly to protect management and sales figures, or raised incorrectly by the customer, in this leads to further unnecessary expense to the business.

In either of the above examples, often there is no investigation of the causes of the issues raised by customer service, credit or accounts employees, or of negative factors seen, because the costs are deemed to be minimal. When this occurs, because most of these expenses are small in dollar value, management usually fails to accept these costs may eventually cause a major factor leading to the demise of the business.

The problems when small expenses occur due to a lack of resources in the above areas and management biases exist, usually lead to lost sales and customers, plus unnecessary expenses are incurred. In addition, it is likely that both internal and external opportunities for fraud will increase.

When many of these small expenses occur unabated and repeatedly in good times, increased sales can perhaps hide the problems in the short term. Currently, however, we are all in tough economic times and there appears to be no noticeable improvement in the immediate future. In such an environment, no business can continue to bear the repeated costs of continued unnecessary expenses, not even in small ones which occur for no good reason.

This Month's Business Inconvenient Truth

The world continually changes, much to the frustration of many businesspeople already entrenched in their businesses. Every change involves money which they would rather keep than pay out in expenses, which as they see it, is just to stay in business. Other businesspeople fear change and want to stick with the business processes and ideologies which they are comfortable with and may have been successful in the past.

Unfortunately, particularly in this post COVID period, almost everything we know has changed into an environment which is largely foreign to that of the immediate past. The new dynamics of the business environment now dictates that we need to know which business practices and thinking remain valid today. We also need to rethink what we know about other matters such as debt, government, bureaucratic and do-gooder philosophies and possible interference in our businesses.

Over the years, I have presented many of the factors which remain successful for all businesses and which factors are not impacting negatively on all businesses. You can find the access to this information on our website and from other sources around you today.

To ignore the basics of business which still work today, and the current effect of new influences on your business, is potentially fatal for your business and or job. Many modern changes have robbed many businesspeople of their rights, whilst endorsing bad and fraudulent behaviour to flourish.