Planning for the New Financial Year

The new financial year brings a fresh opportunity to look at your business. What profits do you want to achieve this year? Are you building up your business for sale? Do you want to cut back your working hours? There are many reasons why planning for the new year is beneficial.

Firstly, it is important that you take some time to think about what your business will look like in 12 months’ time. Imagine that you are reporting to your shareholders one year from now. What will you tell them? Some things you may report are:

• What goals did you set?
• What profit/turnover/KPI’s did you make?
• What staffing decisions did you make?
• What strategies did you implement and what was the result?
  
  

Once you know what you want your business to look like, the next step is to put this into a plan and document it. The aim of this is that your business objectives will be clear, and you will be able to keep your team on track. Once you know what your goals are:

• Create strategies to achieve your goals
• Identify what you need to achieve goals – marketing, training, performance management, cost cutting etc
• Set timeframes for achieving goals
• Divide your goals into short-term and long-term – quick wins vs key projects
  

Budget

Once you know what you are aiming for and your strategies for achieving this, it is beneficial to create a budget to see what the outcome will be. 

Effective budgeting identifies current available capital, anticipates incoming revenue, and provides a forecast of upcoming expenditure. By having a formulated budget and referring to it, businesses can measure their performance against expenditure and make sure that resources are available towards business growth and development.