Whether your business is thriving or surviving, it’s important to understand where your business’ cash flow sits. At businessDEPOT, we use a great tool to help business owners and managers understand how much cash is in their bank accounts and available to use should they need or want it. We like to call it ‘the BOP’, also known as Balance of Payments! This handy little tool can help you to analyse your business’s balance sheet and identify how much cash is available in the short-term.

To learn more about ‘the BOP’ watch our short video [and transcript below].

transcript

There’s a great little tool we’ve been using a lot lately with our clients, irrespective of whether they are still focusing on surviving or whether they’re focusing on thriving during these times.

And it’s a great little tool that we use to just help business owners, business managers get a handle on how much cash in the bank is actually theirs, how much is actually available to use should they need to use it, or how much is available to use should opportunities present themselves.

And I call it the BOP, B-O-P. It stands for balance of payments. And really it is essentially looking at your balance sheet, which many business owners don’t look at their balance sheet, looking at the balance sheet and getting some of the key items off your balance sheet to work out what your available cash is.

Now we have a great BOP template that we can make available to you, but essentially it’s how much cash have you actually got in the bank, what are our commitments over the next 30 days, how much is in the bank is GST that we need to remit on our next base, well, how much in the bank is actually for our income tax commitment later in the year.

Of course, we also then need to allow for a bit of money coming in, so have a look at your debtors and how much of that do we expect to get in the next 30 days as well. And obviously, add all that up and that’s going to give us our available cash, or as I call it, the BOP.

Now, if you’d like to know more about the BOP, we’re happy to share the template that we have available for it or reach out to me and I’m happy to talk you through on how we use it to help business owners get a handle on the cash that is available in their business for them to use.

we’re here to help!

If you have any questions or would like to know more about how to use ‘the BOP’, feel free to reach out to John Knight or the accounting team at businessDEPOT.

First published in October 2020.