Pricing your products and services right could be the difference between being successful in business or not.  You don’t want to price so high that you scare away all your customers but at the same time you want to ensure adequate prices to provide you with a good profit.  The price of your product can also determine the market in which your product will sell.  If you price it too low then you will not have access to luxury markets as it will be perceived ‘cheap’, if you price too high budget and cost conscious markets will be excluded.

We at TW Accounting Services can guide you with Pricing; we can calculate the base cost of producing your product/service, which (in most cases) should be the lowest price you would accept.  Then we can work with market information to help you to reach a price for your products and services that is acceptable to the market and brings you a good profit.

Once you are happy with your prices, you can’t then assume everything will stay the same.  Prices from suppliers will change and your fixed costs will rise.  Hopefully your productivity will increase as you learn.  You must ensure you review your prices in line with these changes to continue to profit from your products and services.

We can provide a regular monitoring service to ensure the combination of your costs and prices maintain a good profit level.  We can highlight any products/services that are not attaining good profits.  And we can suggest ways in which you may be able to maximise profits from individual products and services.

You may run your business from several different locations or you may sell to different markets or through different markets (i.e. on-line and through a physical shop).  Wouldn’t it be good to know how each of these different business streams is performing?  Knowing what each of your different areas of business is contributing to your overall profit can be invaluable.

We can provide a regular monitoring service to review your different business areas – ensuring that you are aware of any problems before they become too problematic.

Budgets and Profit Forecasts are essentially plans for the future for your business.  These are often required externally when you are applying for further investment and loans, but are also extremely useful internally for managing the business.

Do you know where you want to be with the business in the next 5 years, how do you intend to get there?  How will you know if you are on track or not if you don’t measure the business performance against your goal?

Drawing up plans for the future can be hugely beneficial, not only does it give you somewhere to aim, but it also gives you something to evaluate against to check if you are on target to attain your goals.  If achieving your goals is looking unlikely you can take early action and change your activities or plans.

We can help you by building (with you) achievable goals (Budgets) for the future and with our Management Accounting service we can monitor your activity against these goals giving you early warning of any deviations or problems that are likely to occur.

Management Accounts are the regular (usually monthly or quarterly) reviews of business activity against plan (Budgets).  These reviews are invaluable to a business as they can help to predict problems before they occur.  Trends can be identified in growing costs or reducing sales levels and actions can be taken to reverse those trends before they become detrimental to the business.

Management Accounts and Budgets can be prepared down to department or branch level, showing performance against plan for individual areas of your business.  This can be of benefit as an individual area of the business may be performing badly but it is hidden within an overall business performing well.

We at TW Accounting Services can prepare regular Management Accounting reports for your business and meet with you and explain our findings, this allows you to take action early when a problem is identified.

Like Budgets and Profit Forecasts, Cash Flow Forecasts are part of your business plans for the future, and likewise they are generally required externally when you are trying to secure further investment or finance.

They are also extremely beneficial internally as they assist in the management of cash.  With good Cash Flow Forecasts you can determine when in the future you could possibly run out of cash, which allows you to secure additional funds in advance of this.  This could be essential to the survival of your business.  Even the most profitable business, if it runs out of cash, could be forced to close its doors.  If you have plans for a large investment, a Cash Flow forecast can help you determine if there’s a requirement for additional finance.

We can prepare and update your Cash Flow Forecasts for you on a regular basis ensuring that you will have sufficient warning of any potential cash shortfalls.  In addition we can give you advice on how to manage cash shortfalls.

Over the lifetime of your business you will be faced with numerous decisions where financial advice and modelling can be hugely beneficial.

You may wonder what the financial impact would be of increasing your prices by 5% or allowing customers an extra 5 days credit?  What about the financial implication of taking on another 2 members of staff?  We can help with these and many more business decisions by preparing financial models.

We can show you the impact on your cash flow of negotiating an additional 15 days credit from your suppliers and work with you to negate Cash Flow and Working Capital issues by way of financial modelling.