Effective financial management is essential to ensure the long-term viability of your small business or self-employed activity. You need to balance your cash flow to cover your fixed and variable expenses, but it can be difficult to get a clear picture of your day-to-day income and expenditure. Drawing up a projected budget is an essential first step in maintaining your company's financial health. However, it's just as important to keep a close eye on financial indicators to make informed decisions.
Find out how the online business account management interface can help you efficiently plan your small business' cash receipts and disbursements.
VSEs, the self-employed, micro-businesses: what cash receipts and expenses should you expect?
Running a small business or self-employed activity requires special attention to cash flow. With limited resources and sometimes blurred financial visibility, the future and growth of your business may be at stake.
For effective planning, it's essential to anticipate your cash inflows and clearly identify your revenue streams, including :
- sales of products and/or services,
- financial assistance,
- capital contributions and initial cash flow,
- VAT credit, if applicable.
Likewise, it's crucial to keep your expenses under control, whether they're fixed or variable, including :
- premises-related costs (rent, electricity, internet and software subscriptions, etc.),
- taxes (VAT, business property tax, corporate income tax, etc.),
- marketing costs (management of social networks, advertising campaigns, etc.),
- personnel costs (salaries, employer and social security charges, etc.),
- supplier invoices, shipping costs, travel expenses, occasional team expenses...
Your business account, whether it's a VSE pro account or a micro-business pro account, must have sufficient liquidity to cover these expenses and ensure a reserve to deal with any unforeseen circumstances. Although your projected cash flow plan can give you a clear view of future cash flows, it's important to monitor actual movements on a regular basis, as these can sometimes differ from your forecasts and impact your company's financial health, particularly in the event of late payment.
How can you optimize your cash management with an online pro account?
Keeping track of cash inflows is of paramount importance for managers of very small businesses, as well as for the self-employed and micro-entrepreneurs. Efficient cash management is essential to avoid cash flow problems. Technological advances in digital interfaces offer innovative solutions for optimizing these processes.
With your online business account, you can centralize all the steps involved in cash collection in one place. From your customer area, you can perform a multitude of tasks, such as :
- creation of quotations converted into invoices,
- monitoring pending payments,
- program automatic reminders,
- accounting reconciliations.
But that's not all! To reduce your working capital requirements, your online business account offers features to speed up invoice payment. With a simple, intuitive invoicing tool, you can send your invoices in just a few clicks, and include a payment link to facilitate the transaction.
By offering your customers a variety of payment solutions, you also improve your collection capacity. Online accounts for VSEs and micro-businesses offer a range of payment terminals, as well as the option of setting up direct debits or integrating payment buttons on your website.
Digitization helps reduce payment delays by providing you with real-time notifications of incoming transactions. Centralizing information and collection processes on a single financial management platform saves considerable time.
Online account features to help you plan your spending
By fine-tuning your collection solutions and automating your reminders, you can proactively influence your company's cash flow. However, to maintain a healthy cash flow, it's vital not to neglect rigorous expense management.
An online business account allows you to structure your cash outflows efficiently by planning your fixed expenses and monitoring your variable costs.
Creating sub-accounts for fixed costs
Do you want to avoid unforeseen events when it comes to paying your social security contributions and taxes? Or perhaps you're planning to anticipate your VAT obligations?
With sub-account management, you can plan your various expenses in advance. Whether it's a dedicated treasury, a VAT fund, a reserve for Urssaf or even for an upcoming project, these separate accounts act as budget envelopes. By segmenting your finances in this way, you have a clear view of your budget and can better organize your resources.
You can make manual or automatic transfers to these sub-accounts, based on a predefined percentage of your sales. The organizations concerned can also directly debit the amounts due from these sub-accounts, for which a dedicated RIB is provided.
Configurable bank cards for variable expenses
When your team members are required to make expenses on behalf of your small business, it's essential to maintain meticulous control over these transactions. That's where configurable bank cards come in.
With these cards, you can define personalized spending limits and adjust them in real time to avoid overspending. You can also choose to request prior authorization before each payment, block unauthorized cash withdrawals and even automate reminders to obtain the necessary receipts.
These features give you total control over your team's business expenses, while simplifying your company's financial management.