Stocktaking has been given importance by different food and beverage businesses nowadays. The following are weekly lists of Business Licenses issued by Gwinnett County (most recent four weeks). This weekly activity report helps the management understand how each employee performs and how well they are doing their jobs. In my experience, it can be excessive since it introduces seven times the variables as a weekly forecast, and may not improve the accuracy of the forecast.
I. The first step, assuming the data is available, is to lay out sales by segment, branch, business line, or however is best to evaluate the business, by day. The business did over $100 million a year in sales, but we were going to have a $1 million hole due to the major seasonality of the company.
A business can generate adequate revenue (sales) and still suffer from cash-flow problems. You may need to stop by their business on a weekly basis to pick up information, or there are remote online systems that you can use to get into their bookkeeping software.
Breaking the business down on a weekly basis captures the granular movements that can be overlooked if using a month, quarterly, or yearly interval. An owner may expect cash to flow to capital over an indefinite period of time. For example, cash inflows could be large one week if a large amount of receivables are collected, but outflows could be huge the next if payroll and rent are due.
Projecting cash flow for a company with a hybrid business model may seem daunting, but it shouldn’t be. You can simply segment out the lines of revenue by type and use the forecasting methodology for each. For only $10, you can get the leading source of business news, anytime & anywhere, for an entire year.