Testimonial on Cash Forecaster Software 27 March 2012 ERAMA Ltd

Where the payment of your invoices is pushed too far ahead in to the future, you will begin to lose the benefit of any profits made on the business you do and of course your cash at bank will suffer accordingly.

One way to help cash flow if you are finding that your customer are slow at paying is to use invoice discounting or factoring. With this you get the payment from the factoring company at the time of invoicing, which will make a huge difference to your cash flow. However, like any type of financing, thee are costs associated with them and with factoring or invoice discounting you will pay the discount house a fee on the invoices that are factored, plus an interest charge on the money advanced to you.

Planning forward for your business is also important, to work out how to afford expansion plans if that is what you are doing and to work out timings of payments and receipts to the business. However, it is important to stick to your plan as far as possible. When you are making these plans, the use of factoring or invoice discounting in financing your expansion can be reviewed using cash flow forecasts.

We have been developers of software since the early 1990′s so you might expect us to be able to answer the question – “what makes good software great?” So this article has been written with this question in mind and as we also run businesses, we should know what makes great small business software.

Ease Of Use

As far as we are concerned, top of the list for great software is ease of use. We feel that it is extremely important to be able to get up and running within minutes of loading the software on your computer. A software product that has all the bells and whistles, and one that provides you with a long list of what it can do, if its not easy to use, then the software is never going to be great.

Combining a full set of features with ease of use is always a tricky balance to reach. This also takes time and a good understanding of the problems that one is trying to solve with software, as well as listening to users of the product. For software to be easy to use, it needs to be intuitive to the user so that it feels obvious with what needs to be done to complete a task or operation using the software.

“Therefore, we rate ease of use as a top priority of great software.”

Functionality

As already mentioned under ease of use, great software must be feature rich, by which we mean the software should provide the user with the functionality to do what it has been purchased to do. Adding more and more functions to software is the natural progression and one that is mostly driven by its users, but software developers need to be careful not to lose site of the number one principle of ease of use. Functionality is the starting point in the development of most software products and one of the areas businesses compete, but everything is always a balance.

“Therefore, we rate functionality as the second key element of great software.”

Reliability, with excellent help and support

For software to be great it must be reliable, because feature-rich software that continually crashes wastes time and is not good to work with. I am sure we have all used software products that have crashed, even huge companies like Microsoft have their problems with software such as Windows. Also, it is vital that the software provides correct and valid information that businesses can rely on. To backup great reliability the software producer needs to have good back up support and help that can be easily accessed by software users. Software is made great when it has good help included when the product is purchased and where answers to questions can be quickly and easily found.

“Therefore, we rate software reliability along with help and support as another key element.”

Value for Money Software

There is no point in having great software, which is easy to use with great functionality, but is then unaffordable. Therefore value for money is another important aspect of good small business software. As developers and sellers of business management software ourselves, we know how important it is to charge a reasonable price to ensure the continuity in the development of the software, but not charge more than it is worth to anyone. Of course market forces play a key role in this, since if a product is too costly then no one will buy it.

“Therefore, the concluding key element to great small business software is affordability and value for money.”

We recently received a request from a user of our cash flow software, asking us to change the depreciation options in our software – and that is exactly what we did.

So now instead of simply depreciating each asset from the purchase date – the software now has the easy facility to switch so that it depreciates assets fully in the year of purchase also.

This is the response we received from these very happy users:

“Just wanted to thank you for sending the updated version – you are a star

Its a pity there isn’t more around like you – it’s so refreshing to actually get proper support for a product and your wish list answered too!!

Anyway thanks again – much appreciated!

We always welcome positive feedback about our cashflow software and are always willing to make an upgrade where we consider the change to be a worthwhile change.

We are always looking to improve the software and listen to our users and as a result of a recent request from one of our larger company users we have now incorporated this recent change.

So if you are looking for easy to use cash flow software for a reasonable price you have come to the right place.

Larger UK companies have to pay Corporation Tax on a quarterly basis so we are pleased to be able to offer this recent upgrade to our cash flow software.

To enter quarterly tax payments from the regular one-off payment is easy and Cash Forecaster allows you to switch to this method of payment in any year should your business need to change over to quarterly payments.

There are only a few subtle changes, one of which is that if you order the free version and if you have experimented with data – you can order the code to ‘liven’ up the free version to work as a full version of your choice.

We have also changed the profit and loss report to include depreciation on the face of the profit and loss instead of being part of the overhead report under financial overheads.

Small businesses often overlook invoices as one of the most flexible ‘assets’ within the business. As such, rather than have money tied up in invoices that have yet to be paid, you can receive an initial payment up font (typically 80-85% of the gross value of the invoice). The remainder of the invoice will be paid to you when the customer pays the invoice to the Invoice Finance provider, less the service fee (Typically 1-3%). Your business thereby obtains the majority of the value from its invoices, instantly, without having to wait for the customer to pay.

There are numerous advantages to invoice financing (debt factoring or invoice discounting), but also some potential drawbacks.

Advantages

Factoring provides a large and quick boost to company cashflow. This can be extremely valuable for businesses that are short of working capital. A business that is owed £100,000 may be able to get £80,000 or more in just a few days.

Other advantages:

 - As there are many factoring companies in the market prices are usually competitive.

 - This can be an extremely cost-effective way of outsourcing your sales ledger while freeing up your time to manage the business.

 - It assists smoother cashflow and financial planning.

 - Some customers may respect factors more than your business and therefore pay more quickly.

 - Factoring companies may be able to give you useful information about the credit standing of your customers and they can help you to negotiate better terms with your suppliers.

 - Factors can prove an excellent strategic and financial resource when planning business growth – it is a fast way of gaining working capital.

 - If you choose non-recourse factoring you will be protected from bad debts. 

 - Cash is released as soon as orders are invoiced and is available for capital investment and funding of your next orders.

Disadvantages

Disadvantages Queries and disputes may have to be referred on. For this reason, factoring works best when a business is efficient and there are few disputes and queries.

Other disadvantages:

 - The cost associated with the invoice financing will mean a reduction in your profit margins on each order or service fulfillment.

 - It may reduce the scope for borrowing as your book debts will not be available as security.

 - Factors may want to vet your customers and influence the way that you do business.

 - It may be difficult to end an arrangement with a factor as you will have to pay off any money they have advanced you on invoices if the customer has not paid them yet.

 - Some customers may prefer to deal directly with you.

 - How the factor deals with your customers will affect what your customers think of you. Make sure you use a reputable company that will not damage your reputation.

 - You have to pay extra (An insurance policy) to remove your liability for bad debtors.

If you are considering the options of using invoice financing by way of factoring or invoice discounting you might like to try out Cash Forecaster, which has this feature built in.

In addition to having good cash flows, every business would like to ‘Increase Profit.’

Small business owners often ask ‘How do I grow my business?’ and ‘How do I increase business value?’

Normally increased profits go hand-in-hand with higher business value, however, before a company can begin increasing profits it needs to identify how it is going to do it. With this in mind Bowraven’s Profit Increase Software is designed to identify ways to bring in extra revenues, increase profit margins and to extract additional revenues from existing customers, instead of what most businesses do, which is to focus on getting new customers.

Understanding the ’7 Ways to Grow a Business’ and on knowing how to identify Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) is key to business success. When you invest in Profit Increase Software the accompanying book explains the 7-ways to grow any business and will help you to understand Key Performance Indicators, which are measures commonly used to help an organisation define and evaluate how successful it is.

Business is about investing and getting a return on that investment. Any business that has invested in and used Increase Profit Software has had that investment returned in multiples of hundreds, but more likely by thousand’s of per cent. Increase Profit Software identifies the areas of profit improvement and targets the 7 Ways to Grow Your Business.

Once these have been identified you can focus on how to increase profits and on KPI Measurement and then on KPI performance. Increase Profit Software is designed to identify the areas of your business that are sensitive to adjustment and hence key to growing your business and its profitability. Increased profits combined with excellent cash flow will in turn increase cash in the bank.

along with this update we added the ability to add GST (General Sales tax) for the Australians and New Zealand customers with the additional periods needed for their government tax system.

We will continue to add to our software and develop it – the above changes came as a result of a question from a buyer. You don’t have to buy it to see if it is right for you, as we have a free version that can be downloaded very easily so that you can test it out first and then ask questions on our support forum.

We welcome all feedback and recommendations and will try to cater to each persons needs.

Within the set up section of our software you have the option to change the currency symbol to the currency of your country – which might be ‘£’ if you are in the UK or ‘$’ if you are in American (USA), Australia or New Zealand and the € for European countries and Ireland.

At the same time we also changed the Sales Tax section of the cashflow forecast software, so that instead of just accounting for VAT, it also has Sales Tax and GST. This makes the software accessible by businesses in America, Australia and New Zealand too.