This white paper discusses the 'accounting gap' issue for small businesses - an issue that MUST be resolved for any small business to become a successful larger business. Smaller businesses face a serious disadvantage compared to larger businesses when it comes to financial management support. This can leave management unsure of how the business is performing and with a limited understanding of how the drivers of profit are behaving. This puts the business at a high level of risk, impacts its ability to raise finance, and ultimately devalues the market value of the business if the owners wish to [...]

Accessing debt to finance your business growth opportunities is a critically important requirement to achieve business success. All lenders place a heavy reliance on the financial reports provided by applicants. Lenders are very sophisticated businesses and they will have experienced people scrutinising the applicants for finance. If you assume their default position is that the application should be denied - and that their job is to find the reasons why it should be denied - you can also assume they will take a sceptical approach to assessing the reliability of financial reports. So, to ensure that you can verify [...]

It depends on your management culture and the stage of your business lifecycle How different levels of financial management services can add value to businesses in relation to their lifecycle stage Stage 1: Start up/Early stage Requirements will vary for the different profiles of businesses in this stage. Profiles will include: Limited capital/grunt equity/lengthy early stage Well capitalised/short early stage Financial Management Issues: As the management team grows, reliable financial reporting becomes more important for profitable decision making Early-stage companies often have under-developed financial reporting capabilities. This requires appropriately structured general ledger [...]