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Operation Getting More Value In Business

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As a business, providing customers with value for money. However, you mustn’t forget to ensure that your spending generates the best results too. Making your capital work harder will lift a great weight from your shoulders while also enabling you to pass some of the savings onto your clients.

So, how exactly can you ensure that all decisions are made in the best interests of your customers? Here’s all you need to know.

StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article | Business Financies
 
Assemble The Strongest Possible Team

The majority of business matters will be handled by your employees. Therefore, getting the recruitment process under control should be the first item on your agenda. This should be followed by an ongoing investment into their development both individually and as a team. The best ways to achieve this are through training and team building exercises. When they work harder, you’ll get more value for money on a daily basis. There is no stronger foundation for success.

Keep Assets In Good Health

Taking care of your business assets will unlock greater performance levels and prolong the lifespans. Keeping business vehicles in good health with the right gas oil is a significant step in the right direction. Meanwhile, computer system updates should bring telling results too. Even though the daily maintenance can have a very significant impact, you must learn to spot signs of faults. The sooner you act, the sooner you’ll restore their health. This should save a lot of money in the long run.

Research Your Purchases

You already know that customers want to get the best value for money when buying products or services. You should take a similar approach before completing your transactions. Simple ideas like using price comparison sites can work wonders. Likewise, you’ll want to check that any company you plan to do with business can be trusted. Falling victim of fraudulent activity or inadequate supplies will harm the venture and could be very hard to recover from. It’s best to be safe rather than sorry.

Know Your Demographic

Marketing is an area where only the best will do. Efficient marketing should be built around targeting a key audience. It’s impossible to impress everyone, but smarter research and insights will allow you to focus on the people that are likely to purchase. SEO, PPC, trade show stools, printed materials, and social media marketing can all be used to great effect. Remember to analyse the success of every campaign and make the necessary adjustments for ongoing success.

Avoid Bad Debts

While you obviously want to get as many sales as possible, you must not force thing when dealing with repayment plans. Good sales figures count for nothing if the money never arrives. Understanding bad debts and how to avoid falling victim to them is vital. While some people will default on payments, but you don’t want to let this become a major problem. Protect yourself in this manner, and your hopes of maintaining a positive cash flow will be greatly increased.

When the financial elements are under control, you can focus on actively driving the venture in the right direction.

5 Ways Healthcare Facilities Can Improve Their Financial Performance

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StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program ArticleHealthcare facility operating margins are under pressure from all sides. Uncompensated care of patients, slow paying insurance providers, reduced government reimbursement rates and rising costs are all contributing factors. Cutting staff and similar solutions risk quality of care and an extended wait time. Here are four ways healthcare facilities can improve their financial performance without adversely impacting patients.

Measure and Manage Based on the Right Metrics

The metrics you use as the yardstick for organizational performance affect how people act. Instead of seeking to get patients out as soon as possible, look at readmission rates. It would be better to invest a little more time and effort up front so that patients don’t have to come back later. This is so important that low re-admissions are necessary to join an accountable care organization or ACO. Instead of simply measuring the time it takes to discharge a patient, focus on finding the most efficient and error-free method of doing so. You want to ensure that acute patients receive appropriate self-care instructions and follow-ups so they don’t end up getting worse. You can also use data to identify opportunities for improvement, whether it is determining where to streamline operations or which profit-centers you may want to expand.

Work with Payors, Not Against Them

Healthcare facilities have no control over underpayments from government health programs. They can work with commercial and employer-based payers such as insurance carriers, and they can work with private pay patients. Healthcare facilities should take the time to understand their existing contracts and look for ways to better meet those contracts, so that they receive as much money back as possible. A common solution is renegotiating contracts.

A surprising number of uninsured patients are eligible for government programs. Work with them to sign them up for programs so that the facility can reduce its rate of uncompensated care or bad debt from those who cannot afford expensive ER and OR bills.

Reevaluate Your Suppliers

Work with your vendors to save money on supplies; that is the second largest expense in most healthcare facilities. Ask vendors about discounts you could receive simply due to the volume of items you already consume. Inquire about discounts if you ordered items in bulk and run inventory so that you don’t order items you don’t need.

Collect Data to Manage Labor Costs

In medical facilities, labor costs and labor-related costs may be more than half of all expenditures. Focusing on other areas is a waste of time if these expenses are not under control. The solution is to carefully track data on staffing and manage labor on a cost-per-patient-day level. Don’t over-staff one area and under-staff another. Make data-driven labor decisions whether hiring, firing, or assigning overtime. Hold regular meetings on managing labor rolls monthly, quarterly and annually. Don’t cut 10% across the board, but instead cut those individuals who are redundant or under-utilized. If labor costs are high in an area, you can look for third-party service providers who you could outsource the work to.

Use risk reporting software to find gaps in dynamic care, study financial trends, and determine the risks you may face based on resource allocation decisions. Then you won’t end up hurting patients with understaffing during a predictable peak demand or fall short of cash unexpectedly.

Industry surveys have found that finances are the number one concern of executives year after year. Following these tips can help you cut costs and improve revenue without hurting the quality of care patients receive.

5 Money Management Tips for Entrepreneurs

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Finances Article
 
As an entrepreneur, you know how important money management is. Both inside and outside of the workplace, it can be the difference between struggling to make ends meet and paving your way for financial success. What’s more, it can be the difference between making and losing a profit. For this reason, money management simply must be a skill that you work on and try to become well versed with regards to.

If you feel that your career as an entrepreneur is being held back by a lack of knowledge on your part in the art of money management, then make sure to check out the five pieces of advice below.

1. Establish personal financial goals and steps to reach them

In order to turn over a profit in your career and grow your entrepreneurial portfolio as a result, you must, first, be able to manage your money on a personal level. Well, if you can’t look after your own money, how are going to be able to look after a business’s or even another person’s?

To learn how to look after your own money, you should establish some personal financial goals. It means setting targets and being proactive in the steps that you take to reach them. Whether this means aiming to have a specific amount of money saved by a particular time, or whether this means spending a certain amount in a week, you should set your targets and put plans into place so that you can reach and hit them. By becoming well versed in the art of goal setting and step taking as a person, you’ll succeed as an entrepreneur because these are skills that are exchangeable.

Something else that you should do on a personal level is to know what your credit score is. You’re never going to get anywhere as an entrepreneur if you don’t know what your rating is. What’s more, you could actually be held back from making future investments based on past discrepancies. It means that knowing where you stand with regards to credit is essential.

2. Get educated

If you want to become a genuinely great manager of money, then you need to educate yourself financially as often and as fervently as you can. It doesn’t necessarily mean taking a course in finance or accounting; this just means throwing yourself into tasks in which you have to be on the ball in a financial sense to stand any chance of success.

A good first port of call is to throw yourself into the deep end with investing and stock markets. By learning all about what it takes to study and manipulate ever-changing financial markets, you will soon understand how to stay afloat financially no matter what financial fiasco comes your way. By educating yourself in regards to bull and bear markets and what kinds of investments can and should be made within them, especially, you will set yourself up for a lifetime of financial strength and longevity. In this instance, you should check out Dr Kent Moors stock picks, specifically the information that details oil investment, as this will help you to have a better grasp on what, how and when certain investments should be made.

3. Learn to crunch numbers

By learning how to crunch numbers, you will be able to make sense of every financial figure that comes your way, which means that you’ll never be left dumbfounded by anything that you come across, and you’ll find yourself missing out on profit far less. To learn how to crunch numbers and reach financial figures easily, spend as much time as you can with your company’s accountants. Also, you could try playing games that rely heavily on one’s ability to read and understand financial patterns, one such game being poker.

Learning how to crunch numbers will also benefit you in your quest to become a great marketer. This is because number crunching will teach you what it takes to translate the impact of trends and then turn them into tangible results for yourself.

4. Become well versed in the art of organization

You’re never going to become an entrepreneur that has a reputation for being great with their money if you aren’t good at organization. It doesn’t just means learning how to organize your money, either. You should treat organization as if it is a way of life. You should know where everything is at all times, and you should know where you have to be at all times too.

In regards to chronicling your financial information specifically, start by organizing everything into categories. Put information of the utmost importance and outgoing payments that are deemed urgent at the forefront of your financial plans, and sums that can afford to be left unattended for a while on the back burner.

5. Find yourself a mentor

If you aren’t a professional accountant or financial advisor, you will struggle from time to time when it comes to money management. Sometimes you’ll feel like you can’t keep up with all of your monthly outgoings and incomings, and sometimes you’ll spend far more than you can afford to. To stop yourself from inflicting irreparable damage on yours or your business’s financial status, you should find yourself a mentor who can guide you. It could mean working alongside an accountant at your firm, it could mean hiring a financial consultant to help you from time to time, or it could simply mean talking to an older friend or relative of yours that has some experience in equity and asset holding.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, then learning how to manage money is an absolute must. To do this, you should ensure that your personal finance is as strong as it can be, you should educate yourself with regards to investment, you should learn how to number crunch, you should organize yourself in a business sense and as a person, and you should align yourself with a mentor. By doing all of this, you’ll be well on your way towards being able to handle even the largest sums of money.

Why Your Business Needs An Online Bank Account

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleOnline banking has become increasingly popular over the years with many people choosing to manage their finances online. This is because there are many benefits to online banking such as easy access to your finances, online transfers and much more. Surprisingly, many businesses still don’t use online banking, making their lives a lot harder. If you run a business but don’t yet have an online bank account, you should keep reading to find out why you should make the change.

It Is Easier To Manage

When you run a business, you often have to take some time to look through your finances. When you have a lot of paper bank statements in front of you, cheques and all sorts of other materials, it is a lot easier for things to get lost. This is why you should think about opening a BB&T online bank account if you want to be able to manage your business finances a lot more easily. BB&T have a range of checking and saving accounts for businesses that come with a lot of account extras which you should take advantage of. These include online banking and customizable checks.

Faster Payment Of Bills

There’s nothing worse than paying a bill and finding out that the cheque never made it to the company in the post. This can often mean that late charges are added on and there are usually other consequences. If you want to be able to pay your bills in a faster and much more efficient way, you should think about opening up an online bank account for your business.

Save Time

How much time do you spend going to the bank each week or sending one of your staff members there? When you have an online bank account, you’ll rarely need to go to your local bank branch and so you’ll save yourself some more time. This will give you a lot more time to focus on the other important parts of your business and you won’t need to make sure that you get to the bank before it closes.

Get Paid Faster

As a business owner, you often need to make sure that all of your clients have paid you within the time frame needed to ensure that your business is profiting. If it takes a lot longer for your clients to pay you, you might find that this can have a negative impact on your figures. Make sure to get yourself an online bank account if you want your clients to be able to pay you a lot faster. You will love seeing the money enter your bank account almost immediately and you’ll be able to ensure that everything is paid on time.

Get Started Now

In this day and age, there really is no reason for you not to be using an online bank account for your business. There are so many advantages of doing this and if you are still visiting your bank branch a few times a week then you are wasting valuable business time. Think about finding the best online bank account for your business and you’ll love the perks.

How to Avoid a Business Bankruptcy

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StrategyDriven Entrepreneurship ArticleThe number of small businesses filing for bankruptcy increases every year, and while bankruptcies don’t always lead to the full closure of the company, in a lot of cases they do. If your dream business is currently on the verge of bankruptcy, don’t panic. There are some steps you can take that may help you to turn things around. Try to think as positively as you can and put the following steps into action.

1. Look at the Figures

The first thing you need to do is work out how much you need to make each month to survive. This includes both the money you need to actually live, and the money you need to repay your creditors. Add 20% to this figure to give yourself a cushion. Finally, add in the costs of running your business. This includes everything from your bills to your payroll to the cost of inventory. With this information at hand, you need to work out how much your business is earning each month. If you are facing bankruptcy, it’s likely you have a deficit between the two numbers. The next steps are going to focus on decreasing costs and increasing profit to give you enough to cover everything you need to pay.

2. Cut Costs

Okay this sounds simple, but there is sure to be some ways that you can lower your expenses to meet your spending goals. Consider getting rid of your traditional phone plan and switching to VoIP, look into cheaper packaging options, and look into obtaining new quotes for any services you receive that aren’t under contract. The aim here is to look for redundant costs that your business can do without and either eliminate them entirely or reduce the amount you are spending.

3. Renegotiate with Your Creditors

Phone your creditors and let them know you are considering bankruptcy. The majority will be happy to come up with a payment plan that works for you so long as it means they will still receive what they are owed (with bankruptcy there is no guarantee they will be paid). Some may be willing to waive the interest, while others will extend the terms of your debt so that you have longer to repay it. You could also file a consumer proposal with your creditors if you don’t want to speak to them directly.

4. Look at Short Term Cashflow Options

We’re not necessarily suggesting that you take out loans to cover your cash flow. Instead, speak to your vendors and ask them for more lenient payment terms. If they can extend their terms, you will free up more cash in the short term. Another option is to ask your clients to pay you quicker. You could offer them a small percentage off their invoice if they are willing to pay faster. Both of these options will provide a boost in the short term.

Sometimes filing for bankruptcy is the only option. However, it is worth giving the above a try first if it could mean saving your business.