There is nothing like a pandemic to sharpen the mind when it comes to understanding the importance of management information.
Whether you are one of the many businesses facing a worrying downturn, or one of the lucky few that are experiencing an unexpected boom, understanding the impact on your resources, financials and, more importantly, your cashflow will leave you in a better position to weather the storm and look after your workforce.
If you already have a good forecast model in place or, failing that, the last budget you prepared, now is the time to update it to reflect what you are experiencing currently. This will allow you to assess the impact on your business and plan accordingly.
As we cannot predict how long the current situation will last, or how severely it will impact your clients and suppliers, we recommend creating several versions to account for different scenarios. This will help you to understand the variety of risks, or even the opportunities, that you may face.
The best models are, of course, automated and directly feed through to your cashflow to show you the impact instantly. This will enable you to adjust expenditure, assess what you might need to plug the gap, and help you to take appropriate steps in good time.
Keeping cash moving through the entire system is key to damage limitation. Ensuring that not only you are still in business, but your suppliers are still in business when we emerge from these unusual times, will allow us to return to normal as soon as possible.