Business First Family Business, Accounting, Finance, Investing, Marketing And Management
Running a home based business is not at all easy. In many cases this is because the individual does not have the necessary business experience to make everything successful. At the same time, we should understand that it does not matter how successful you are. There is always the possibility that cash-flow problems are going to appear. Unfortunately, in many cases this leads to shutting down the business, according to bankruptcy attorney David Offen. You need to know at least what the common mistakes are. This is what we will focus on below.
Overestimating How Much You Will Sell In The Future
Being way too optimistic is the downfall of many home businesses. If you want to be an entrepreneur you have to be realistic. Assuming that you will sell a specific volume in the future can easily lead to cash-flow problems. If you do not sell, you might not have the case you need to actually create the items that you are selling.
It is really important that you are patient and that you properly understand exactly how much you can expect in the future from the home business. In fact, it is better to assume you will make minimum sales as opposed to maximum sales. If you can manage that, there won’t be any problem if you make more.
Impulse Spending
When business goes well, you are normally tempted to make money investments. Unfortunately, in many situations the investments you make are just impulse expenditures. You need money in order to make money so if you spend money without a real goal, you lose money. Overspending is incredibly common in the early months of existence for the home business.
Whenever you spend money, be sure that you analyze the decision. Is it something that will help the home business grow or not? If the answer is negative, the best thing to do is to just invest the money in something else.
Not Caring About Past-Due Receivables
This is an incredibly fast cash-flow killer for a small home business. If there are numerous invoices that are not paid by clients it is very hard to deal with the situation. That is why you need to be sure that you are as proactive as possible about payment collection.
In most cases the big problem is that there are no collection policies and penalties for late payments that are put in place. When the client is not sure that he/she will be contacted as soon as the payment is late, there is a chance that they will just postpone payments. Do be sure that you set really clear policies and that you discuss them with customers. If payments are late, penalties should be in place. For instance, you can set up a 5% penalty every 5 days after an invoice is due and is not paid.
Never be ashamed to contact clients that did not pay. In some situations they simply do not know that this happened. There are even cases when there was some sort of technical problem that appears. If you do not contact clients, you do not know what happened.
