Launching a Successful Start-up

Why do some businesses fail while others take off almost right from the very beginning? Is it the services they provide or products they offer to their clients? Is it the way in which they conduct business or the competencies they possess that make or break a business?

Businesses could fail for a number of reasons, including:

• Inadequate budget
• Inadequate infrastructure (resulting from a tight budget)
• Lack of understanding about the market and customer needs
• Losing focus or purpose

The last item more often results from not outlining objectives clearly.

Establish Clear Business Goals

Establishing clear goals should be priority; most businesses fail because they lose focus and direction midway. Outlining and defining your goals gives you direction and allows you to progress systematically. It helps to define goals clearly. For small to mid-size businesses and enterprises, well-defined goals can help provide much-needed motivation as well.

Ideally, separate them into different sections like service goals, financial goals, and business development goals. Keep in mind that some goals will be dynamic, changing as the business gathers steam.

• Financial goals: If you think of profits first, you are not alone. But realistically, businesses need to break even before jumping to profitability. Your financial goals can include steps to first recover the funds you invested in starting the business. Cash flow management can help you in this process by allowing you to allocate specific sums for expenses.
• Business development: All businesses need to work at this constantly, if they have to grow. Whether it is tapping your customer base directly or including promotional marketing and advertising; outline your goals clearly.
• Service goals: This is also a good way to ensure consistency in your business, if you are more than a single founder or owner. Define and establish service goals, including delivery areas and limitations.

Understanding Core Competencies

When you first establish a service goal, you come closer to understanding your core competencies. Core competencies take into account ability together with the resources available to you. So, how do you identify and analyze your core competencies? To identify your core competencies, remember:

• Core competencies should be unique to your business; you should not have too many competitors offering it, otherwise it is not really your core competency.
• It should add value to your clients’ work or services or products.

To this end, your core competencies can be varied. They can be technical or related to a particular product. Your core competencies could lie in the way you deploy and manage a process such that your client can optimize their own resources and infrastructure best.

Identify areas lacking expertise

A start up may get crippled by lack of expertise in a specific area or industry. This can be reflected in terms of poor work quality, incorrect pricing strategies, or inaccurate delivery time.

Areas lacking in expertise can include a service, a process, or even something technical, such as a particular technology you may be unable to install.

For a small business, for example, utilizing technology can prove to be extremely advantageous. How often do you come across a website that seems promising, only to discover that the business backing it up cannot live up to its claims. Some businesses may not be able to afford current technology and expenses that come along with it. However, in current times, technology is woven across business functions and any incompetency could also surface in the administrative, operational or financial areas of a business which require their own expertise. Problems in any of these areas can impact startup operations, thus leading to failure.

Every business will face challenges at some point; success lies in resolving issues as best as you can.

If it is niche services like specific IT matters, accounting and financial matters, marketing services etc., you may be better served by outsourcing. Outsourcing can take care of your need for expertise, together with budget restraints.

Launching a successful start-up involves hard work, discipline and a certain amount of business “know how”. Analytix Solutions has a team of experts who work with start-ups to improve their business processes and help move their company forward. For a free analysis of your business processes and more information on how we can help your business succeed, please contact us at sales@aixsol.com

Analytix Solutions
The Company that CPAs Recommend
Analytix Solutions is a professional full-service business support solutions provider. The company offers comprehensive and scalable bookkeeping and accounting services while leveraging its expertise, experience, and state-of-the-art infrastructure. It offers multiple services in diverse packages for companies that are seeking a trustworthy and professional partner to give their business a head start.

Accounting Pitfalls to Avoid

Accuracy is critical in accounting. From basic bookkeeping to financial reporting, accurate and timely entries are essential practices for any business. Adherence to disciplined accounting practices enables businesses to accurately monitor the financial health of their company.

In addition to accounting accuracy, businesses also need to ensure that they have an understanding of key functions such as cash flow planning and management.

Following are some accounting pitfalls to avoid, particularly for small businesses, where resources and budgets are often rationed.

Missing entries and untracked expenses

It is easy to forget about recording an expense once the transaction is complete. Once an entry is missed, it may go unnoticed until tax time. Not only does this result in inaccurate accounting and finances, it can also erode profits, as expenses which are smaller than those stipulated by the IRS guidelines remain unrecorded by business owners. However, these small expenses accumulate and could be beneficial to track for tax purposes. Even small expenses can add up to help you qualify for effective tax deductions.

Mismanaging cash flow

Cash flow management helps you monitor income and expenses. Poor cash flow management can lead to the illusion that there is enough cash, whereas in reality, the income no longer matches the expense. You may feel that there is enough cash reserve, while in reality the expense has already exceeded income. This can happen with your petty cash reserves, as well as with the company's overall finances. With small cash reserves, this problem may be compounded, since it is easy to lose track of money withdrawn.

Not managing the cash flow can result in cash crunches when you least expect or need them, eating into investment opportunities or derailing plans for expansion which may need some initial expenses.

Delaying account reconciliation

Account reconciliation is a critical step in the bookkeeping process. For business owners performing this function themselves, it is often relegated as a task to complete later. However, this opens the door for small errors to snowball into larger accounting mistakes. Further, like poor cash flow management, this can also give you a false sense of liquidity.

Using manual accounting

Manual accounting is not a pitfall in itself, but it can lead significant errors, especially if your company is growing. Accounting software can assist in regulating your bookkeeping, ensuring more accurate books, and eventually, dependable financial reports. Using software to automate accounting can help your business in several ways:

• Automated systems track and update records of funds withdrawn; they also balance the remaining reserves, thus providing the correct measure of liquidity.
• Automation reduces dependency on human beings, therefore reducing opportunities for human error or fraud.
• Automation helps create updated reports and, more importantly, accounts that are tracked and contain recorded data. In contrast to manual bookkeeping, automation can generate reliable audit trails and ensure accurate financial data.

These are just some of the accounting pitfalls that companies should attempt to avoid in an effort to maintain accurate financial records.

Analytix Solutions
The Company that CPAs Recommend
Analytix Solutions is a professional full-service business support solutions provider. The company offers comprehensive and scalable bookkeeping and accounting services while leveraging its expertise, experience, and state-of-the-art infrastructure. It offers multiple services in diverse packages for companies that are seeking a trustworthy and professional partner to give their business a head start.

Transaction Compliance: The Key Factor for High Performing Accounting Processes

Transaction compliance is essential to controlling payment errors such as overpayment in procure-to-pay services. For many businesses, regardless of their industry, accurate, timely payouts can be a challenge- which impacts vendor relationships.

How is Transaction compliance central to high performance accounting?

Procure-to-pay processes are often filled with errors such as inconsistent payments, overpayments, or data and information errors. For businesses that regularly make vendor payments, these issues may get resolved with post-payment audits. However, for many small and mid-sized businesses, seemingly small errors can result in large financial losses.

Prevention is the best solution, and one way of managing this is implementation of a compliance tool.

The transaction compliance tool works towards controlling and preventing errors on the front end of financial transactions as opposed to correcting them once damage has been done. Transaction compliance can prevent overpayment errors before they occur.

Small businesses that operate under budget restriction can outsource transaction compliance, which does not need to be an in-house function. Many successful businesses outsource some of their services to reduce costs; but they also turn to outsourcing to optimize existing resources and to leverage professional expertise, making them more efficient.

How can transaction compliance tools help me?

Transaction compliance tools are designed to prevent you from making overpayments. This is accomplished through stringent monitoring of both purchase and payment transactions. Apart from simply monitoring transactions, the tool also provides data that offers useful pointers which outline deficiencies in the procure-to-pay process while also allowing you to identify possible improvements.

Apart from helping your company avoid payment-related errors, the tool also facilitates smoother cash flow and reduces post-audit costs. Furthermore, considering the role it plays in monitoring accounts payable, the tool reduces the potential of fraud and fees otherwise paid to third-parties. Integrating the tool in to your financial practices creates a pattern of reduced errors and timely payments – creating better collaboration with vendors and suppliers.

Towards high-performance accounting

When customized to the needs of your business, transaction compliance tool can boost your accounting capabilities and allow existing resources to perform better.

• Monitors accounts payable, thus helping to prevent overpayments.
• Thorough monitoring allows for review of large volumes of data, helping to identify any payment errors before they occur.
• Assists in reviewing and analyzing pricing.
• Fosters collaboration and trust with vendors and suppliers providing timely and accurate payment history.

To find out more information on how to integrate transactional compliance into your financial processes, call us today at 781-503-9004 or email us at sales@aixsol.com

Analytix Solutions
The Company that CPAs Recommend
Analytix Solutions is a professional full-service business support solutions provider. The company offers comprehensive and scalable bookkeeping and accounting services while leveraging its expertise, experience, and state-of-the-art infrastructure. It offers multiple services in diverse packages for companies that are seeking a trustworthy and professional partner to give their business a head start.