Costs are high when you run a small business and it is difficult to work within increasing financial restraints. You may be tempted to do your own bookkeeping and accounting to save a bit of money. But if you fail to work with an accountant, you miss out on valuable business benefits.

Here’s what you potentially lose when you don’t hire a professional accountancy firm like www.gsmaccountants.co.uk.

Tax Breaks and Opportunities

Accountants manage your overall tax affairs and give you clarity on where you can save money. Engaging a professional accountant often cuts the tax you must pay, resulting in actual cost savings even when considering the fees spent on the professional. Accountants will also look at the financial health of your business and plan strategies to increase your profits through sound financial management.

Invoicing Efficiency and Cash Flow Security

When handling your books yourself, you fall behind with your invoicing and you fail to chase up unpaid accounts. Your cash flow suffers and you find yourself with difficulties paying suppliers. Invoicing is critical to the overall financial well-being of your company. Get it right and you benefit from increased cash flow and peace of mind. An accountant helps set up automated systems that produce and send invoices on time, automatically check for payment, give a choice of payment methods for suppliers, and follow up on late invoices. You spend less time waiting for cash and more time building your business.

Peace of Mind

Do you regularly experience the stress of filling out tax returns at the last minute, trying desperately to get the forms correct on your own? Do you have to pay fines when you file late, or incorrectly? You probably don’t give your finances the effort and attention they need. This results in errors with data entry, scrambling to find lost receipts and other documentation, and out of date books. An accountant cleans everything up and does it all on time. You get accurate bookkeeping with up to date documentation. You don’t need to worry about missing deadlines. This peace of mind is hard to beat when you are managing a challenging business.

More Time

Mistakes made in tax returns and paperwork take hours to correct. The processes and procedures involved in getting your tax affairs in order are time consuming and it takes away from the running of your business. An accountant takes tasks off your plate so you have the space to focus on strategic business matters.

Reliable, Proactive Business Advice

An accountant is also a trusted business adviser. They are proactive and creative, identifying strategies and opportunities for business growth. You gain a valuable member of your team when you hire an accountant.

You must handle a lot of things yourself as a small business owner. But you need to decide where it makes financial sense to get extra help. Weigh up the pros and cons of hiring an accountant and ask if it makes your business more financially secure.

There’s no doubt that those who join a sports club do so because they have a passion for the game. Sports clubs are plentiful and can be found everywhere, and they can be comprised of everything from football clubs to baseball clubs to basketball clubs, rugby clubs, and a lot more. If you have started your own sports club and would like for it to be nothing short of successful, then managing it properly should be your top priority. But managing a sports club isn’t easy, as any sports club manager or owner will tell you, and it will take more than a bit of commitment and dedication. You can’t just be committed to it – you also have to have the right knowledge to run it in an organised and seamless manner. So how can you do this without making it too difficult for yourself? Here’s how you can make managing your sports club a much easier task.

Define your objectives and goals

When you start a sports club, you will perhaps already have a goal in mind. It may not be clear-cut, but you are probably thinking that you would like to help others achieve their athletic potential, bring together those who have a love for the sport and who are like-minded, and so on. But you would have to come up with some more clearly-defined goals and objectives so you can stick to these and help yourself (and others) achieve them, not just for the short-term, but also for the long-term. The more detailed you are when it comes to your goals and objectives, the better. A successful sports club, for instance, will have goals and objectives for all roles, and they incorporate these objectives into each position’s overall description.

Make use of proper software

Gone are the days when everything had to be written down and the only way you could keep track of payments and expenses was to create spreadsheets. Today, you can make it a lot easier on yourself (particularly when managing finances and keeping track of member records) by taking advantage of all-in-one software that is also cloud-based so you can access it at any time. Membership softwares such as Coacha have loads of features, allowing you to make sure you are GDPR compliant, that you have all your athletes’ profiles saved and secured, that your sessions and classes are well-organized, and that your members can make automated payments. With such software at your disposal, you can have a much more convenient and easier time running your sports club.

Develop a mentoring programme

Another way through which you can make handling and managing your sports club – and encouraging and inspiring members – is to develop a mentoring programme. This is not just helpful for motivating your members – it is also helpful if you want to build and develop your club’s capacity. You can, for instance, offer your players opportunities to coach at an early age. You can give younger club players roles as assistant coaches so you can let them see what it feels like to coach in a supportive (and safe) environment. With this kind of programme, you can harness the personal development of your members while making sure that your sports club has a good number of skilled coaches for the future.

Business meetings can be exhausting. When you call your employees for a meeting, they might start to groan because they don’t like it. The meeting room is one of the most dreaded places in the office. However, since you need to have a meeting, everyone has no choice but to show up. As a business leader, the least you can do is transform the meeting room and make it as engaging and relaxing as possible.

Keep it simple

Avoid placing too many things in the meeting room. Don’t make it your stock room. Find other places where you can store items that you don’t need yet. The meeting room needs to be exclusively for business meetings and to brainstorm.

Use blinds instead of curtains

Another useful tip is to use blinds. You want to have a seamless connection between the meeting room and the environment. It helps in making sure that you feel connected with nature. When the meeting gets exhausting, everyone can look out and start to feel calm. Seeing a lot of things can also help during brainstorming.

Have a snack bar

Food transforms meetings. When people have something to eat, they begin to relax. It doesn’t matter if the meeting becomes too serious. Everyone will forget it and put on a smile because of what they’re eating. There are also times when you need to extend the meeting to get things done. Some employees won’t mind, provided that they have something to eat.

Create a round table discussion

Don’t make the meeting room like a classroom where everyone faces the teacher. You need to create a round table format so that everyone feels equal. Anyone who wants to speak can stand or use the microphone on the table. You also have to be encouraging so that employees won’t be afraid to speak their minds.

Invest in quality equipment

You want the meetings to be spontaneous and free from technical issues. Therefore, it helps if you have a high-quality projector. Don’t forget to invest in a video wall mount so that it’s easy to use the device whenever necessary. When there’s no need to set up anything, it won’t delay the meeting.

Don’t be too serious

Even if you’re discussing a serious topic, you can inject jokes and look relaxed. When people in the room start to get tense, they won’t think clearly. You want ideas to flow smoothly. Don’t use any barriers that prevent anyone from speaking their mind. Apart from the arrangement of the room, your personality also affects how people think about the meeting.

You want your employees to get excited about meetings. You understand the importance of having them, so you need to encourage everyone to be in their best spirits when attending meetings. Set a clear agenda and a specific time. You don’t want to waste too much time brainstorming or presenting. Empower every employee to come up with excellent ideas that can help the business move forward.

To discover some of the key areas of your business, which you may be spending too much of your business’ budget on, simply continue reading to discover what small businesses spend the most money on.

What Small Businesses Spend the Most Money On:

Power:

Most small businesses spend a fair portion of their budget on their power bill. If you’re the owner of a small business it’s well worth trying to find effective ways to decrease your business’ power bills, like switching providers to Utility Bidder. As an example, you may want to invest in double glazing or you may be interested in swapping out your current light fittings for energy efficient light fittings.

If you’re serious about reducing your next power bill it’s also a great idea to speak to your employees about the importance of turning off lights and electronics when they’re not in use. As you’ll be able to drastically reduce your power bills by making an effort not to waste energy unnecessarily. For example, recent studies have shown that you can reduce your small business’ power bill by up to 70% by simply switching your lights and electronics off when you’re not using them.

To learn more about saving money on your business’s energy costs, check out this informative eBook: SME tips

Production costs:

If your small business produces physical products or digital products it’s highly likely that you spend a large percentage of your business’ budget on your production costs. As an example, you may pay a manufacturer in order to produce your business’ product range for you. Or if you produce your product range yourself you’ll need to pay for machinery and wages, in order to produce your business’ stock.

If you’re interested in reducing your business’ costs, you may want to find clever ways to decrease your business’ production costs. As an example, you may want to switch your supplier or manufacturer, to a cheaper supplier.

Marketing:

Even if you’ve discovered how to harness the power of social media in order to market your business, you may have to spend some of your business’ budget on marketing your business. As the smaller your business is, the harder that you’ll have to work in order to increase your business’ client base. As an example, you may want to pay to have your business’ posts marketed to targeted members of your business’ key audience on social media platforms like Facebook.

Property:

Unless you operate a business which only exists online, you’ll need to either purchase a physical premise for your business or rent an appropriate space for your small business. Unless you choose to purchase a property out right, you’ll end up spending much of your business’ budget on mortgage repayments or on rent.

Staff:

Another sizable expense that you’ll need to factor into your business’ budget is staffing costs. Especially as your business starts to grow as you start to employ additional team members, to handle all of your business’ essential day to day tasks. As an example, as your business grows you may want to invest in employing a few extra part time team members. Who you may eventually choose to offer full time roles.

So if you’d love to be able to greatly reduce your small business’ costs in order to increase your business’ profits, it’s definitely well worth finding ways to decrease some of the costs which are outlined above!

A good practice with any machinery is to perform regular checkups and fix any little issues as soon as possible. If you ignore small problems or naively think an older machine will run as efficiently as a new one without regular maintenance, you could have serious consequences on your hands.

The same goes for hydraulic systems. Due to their moving parts and regular use, they should undergo regular hydraulic repairs and maintenance to ensure they keep running efficiently and safely. Often a little bit of effort regularly prevents major catastrophes in the long term.

The benefits of regular repair and maintenance

The benefits of regularly monitoring hydraulic systems and repairing minor issues when they arise are numerous. Particularly critical is that regular maintenance keeps operators safer from potential hazards. Dealing with issues promptly can help avoid costly repairs later on and can prevent time delays affecting productivity.

Health & Safety

Health and safety are paramount in any work environment, and checking hydraulic equipment regularly is a key way to ensure you are complying with safety standards. Regularly checking and maintaining the integrity of hydraulic equipment helps reduce the risk of accidents. Without doing this, serious harm to operators could result.

Avoid expensive repairs

By putting in a small effort regularly to keep machinery clean, you can delay the need to replace parts and can prevent a significant issue later on. However, if you put off dealing with a small issue, you will likely have a larger and more costly one on your hands. By doing regular hydraulic repairs, you can avoid a costly situation.

Prevent time-loss

If major hydraulic repairs are required, equipment will be out of action for a time. This may have significant consequences for a company. By practicing regular repair and maintenance, you can avoid delaying jobs and losing productivity.

What should you look out for?

There are a number of simple things you can do on a regular basis to prevent negative consequences. You should consider the following things when performing regular hydraulic repairs and maintenance:

• Clean your system. Dirty hydraulic fluid can damage working parts.
• Check your hydraulic fluid including whether it is contaminated, and if the temperature and viscosity are correct for the operating conditions.
• Is your system operating slowly? This is likely a symptom of an issue that needs to be identified.
• Any unusual noises could indicate air is entering the hydraulic system. If the hydraulic fluid is contaminated with air it could cause significant damage.
• Don’t overheat your system.
• Check that your components are working optimally, especially the hydraulic pump, valves, actuators and seals. Small issues with these may cause bigger issues throughout the system.

If you notice any issues, it is best to contact a professional hydraulic repairs service as soon as possible.

Need a trustworthy hydraulic repairs service?

At Hydraulic Solutions, we are able to assist with regular and major hydraulic repairs. If you suspect there is an issue with your system, or you’d just like a regular check up, let us help you. We have years of experience troubleshooting, analysing and repairing every aspect of hydraulic systems. Get in touch with us today on +61 8 9437 5388 or fill out our contact form.