BP3: Making Finance Tracking Easier

29th May 2019

Before I start off this post, I'm going to be very frank about this one thing:

But this is really one of the most crucial things in business - and even in workplaces!

As an intern (part of my compulsory Professional Attachement Programme in NBS, which happens From May to July), I get to see how important keeping track of Expenses is - Without proper recording of the expenses, You won't know how much of your budget has been used.

In a cost centre (like a department), That's not good. If you blow your budget, very soon you're going to need to explain to higher management the reasons for the blown budget, work toward a resolution, and accept the consequences of doing so.

In a Start-Up, it gets worse: Without proper tracking, you simply won't know how much you've spent on gathering the different materials, especially when doing a product like ours, which uses a variety of different materials to transform into a neat, lasting, flower desk piece. This means that you won't have an accurate sense of your Costs per Good sold (or COGS). This will impact overall profitability - If one were setting prices with slim margins, one could accidentally end up in a situation where the company actually loses money per product sold, because of miscalculations when tracking the expenses incurred per product.

Never been more thankful for Google Docs being able to play nice with many of Microsoft Excel's Functions. Initially I thought the Drop-Down List feature in Excel would not be supported in Google Drive, And I was prepared to do without feature. Fortunately Google got that covered.

Anyway, back to this main topic: Thanks to this nifty sheet I Created, We can also see how much each of us has invested into this business at a glance - See how the Total Cash Outflow is captured in the box on the right with our names.

This view was very useful as this view quickly proved something to us:

We admit: We were far too optimistic.

One issue was again with MOQ: The suppliers tend to be willing to give discounts only if we are purchasing large quantities of flowers. Thus, once we ascertained that the supplier was a good source, we immediately bought some inventory of dried flowers which would be used in our products. The Cost for that one variety of flower alone caused about a $35 - But it shows how our group might have underestimated some of our costs.

And We still have not put down any costs in creating a physical channel to sell our goods (in pop-up-stores), for example. Setting up a booth or event also costs money!

Also, we have one member which has unfortunately decided to leave our business group. This also means the rest of us must "cover" for that shortfall, making an increased investment from each of us even more warranted

Our group has thus decided to increase our investment to about $200 each, with up to $300 spent per person. This amount must have at least one pop-up store presence covered as well, apart from covering other costs, including website set-up, marketing costs, COGS, labour, ...etc

As we wait for more of our prototype materials to come in (so we can ascertain the quality of goods before placing more orders), we will move on to establish our online presence.

#StayTuned