Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Becky's Bytes: Have your ducks aligned with CFO-level service


The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) is among a number of resources that suggest outsourcing as a direct means of boosting your bottom line rather than denting it. The role of Chief Financial Officer is one that comes up often as you can see in this related article from the NFIB.
 
Beef up your success quotient by adding an outsourced CFO's time to your own available time, and you will, by default increase the amount time spent on income generating activities...
success = total time - time managing cash flow - time managing risks
                generating revenue time

The CFO for a business manages cash flow: The accounts payable and the accounts receivable. Cash is king and cash flow is critical to businesses small and large. Lying beneath cash flow are the essential tasks of maintaining budgets, taxes, records, insurance, payroll, and liabilities. Consider how much time is gobbled up just in the first third of the year on these responsibilities before tax filing. A full-time CFO works year round so the 'ducks are in a row' prior to tax season, leveraging the best ways to cut expenses, pay bills on time, and keep production going. When a business owner is the CFO because a full-time one is financially out of reach, then it's the producing revenue part that falls to the second priority… behind the ducks.

If you've been behind ducks, you know it's cleaner walking ahead of them.
 
Imagine now that while acting as CFO, you got yourself into an audit. That's a whole flock of ducks you don't want on your beach. This isn't to say a full-time or an outsourced CFO will avoid an audit 100 percent of the time, but it one came up, they – not you – would be spending the time on it, and you could stay focused on the revenue-generating.

Outsourcing buys you an available assistant – available as you need – without the full-time headcount you might not yet need for the business. A way I look at it is that the assistant assists you with having more time with paying customers… and less time with ducks.
 
Photo by Serge Villa, used with permission.

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