How confident are you in explaining how the following terms relate to people within your organisation?
Your personal understanding, combined with intellegent input from staff, who truly understand the critical issues, could be crucial to your on-going success.
These issue include:
On Finance …
Balance sheet, gross margins, net margins, ROI, ratios, bank recs, cash flow forecasting, break even point, working capital, current assets, depreciation, goodwill and variable costs.
On Business Planning and Business Statistics …
We all know the saying ‘Businesses don’t plan to fail, they just fail to plan’. The problem is knowing where to start and deciding which are the right questions to ask e.g. are the following business concepts any use to help us make smarter decisions? e.g. arithmetic mean, standard deviation, correlation, regression, hypothesis testing, time series, range, stock inventory and the application of project management techniques.
A general discussion with professionals who deal in these matters on a daily basis, could clarify these matters quickly and potentially unlock a whole rafts of new opportunities. The good news is that not every management accounting term or business decision tool/process needs to be known in intimate detail. How best to interpret the data is a much better skill to develop.
Some topics e.g. capital investment decisions, determining production quotas, setting SMART sales targets, budgeting etc. can be covered on a ‘need to know’ basis or reviewed and further developed at the start of each new planning period (as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day!).
On Spreadsheets
Using this tool effectively is a massive time saving device for optimum decision making, especially the use of anchors within a spreadsheet application to arrive at multiple ‘what if’ options – especially if accuracy is essential.
See this link to a sample spreadsheet to assess how far you need to go and by when. Alternatively visit the hot links page for further facts and definitiions.
