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If you are in a growth mode, perhaps your business is only a few years old and you are trying to establish yourself in the local market, then your measurements will focus on growth.

Before you can measure your growth you need to be clear about where you are now and where you hope to go. What size is the market? Have you targeted a certain geographic area? Or perhaps a certain channel, like hair salons for your handmade moisturizing products.

Whatever the growth goals are, you can develop a system for tracking your progress. Let’s take a look at Carls’ Candles and the managerial accounting system he has developed to measure his growth.

Carl has been making container candles for three years now. At the current prices Carl has been able to increase sales year over year. But the growth rate has slowed and last year he only grew his sales revenue by 5%.

The market for container candles is growing and the distribution outlets are numerous. Carl has been marketing his candles direct by selling through independent retailers and small gift shops in the area.

Carl sells to the retailers at $3 per candle. The direct costs for each candle are $1 and the overheads are $4,000 per month. In Carls’ overhead budget he includes his own wages, electricity, and insurance. The direct costs include soy wax, containers, fragrance, wicks, and delivery.

Break even for Carl is $3 minus $1 divided into $48,000, or 24,000 candles per year. For the last three years Carl has sold 26,000 then 30,000 and 31,500 candles each year. Carl wants to develop a pricing program that will help him to stretch out into new areas like wholesale distribution.

If Carl keeps his price the same for all his customers he won’t be able to offer a lower price to the wholesalers. But if Carl drops his price to the wholesalers, below the $3 per candle, then he would not be making enough profit. What can Carl do?

Using managerial accounting, Carl has listed out the raw material costs for his candles.
$.45 Soy Wax
$.05 Glass Container
$.01 Wick
$.15 Fragrance
$.44 Delivery
$1 Total Direct Cost per Candle

Carl can offer the same candle to a wholesaler at $3 minus 44 cents for delivery, which equals $2.66 per candle. Will this be enough to increase his sales volumes? Carl puts out a flyer and mails it to all the local wholesalers. His sales increase because now the wholesalers can distribute many more candles than Carl.

But Carl tracks the sales and notices an increase in his wholesale shipments but a decrease in his retail sales. What has happened? The wholesalers are now shipping his old retailers direct. So Carl is selling more product at a lower price. In this simplistic example you can see how managerial accounting has helped Carl make decisions about his growth oriented pricing strategy.

Accounting careers open the door to an entire world of options. You can choose from many different types of careers and opportunities. And once you settle on which career or opportunity you’d like to pursue. you have a world of options for which company you want to work for. Hence, you have variety in what you do and where you do it. Regardless of the wide amount of diversity in where to work and what to do, most accounting careers do hold one thing in common: as a general rule, they keep track of what the company makes and spends.

This is the starting foot for where you decide to go (accounting holds opportunity for job advancement). You may even decide to stay where you’re at, but there usually is room for advancement. As you pursue this advancement, you gain more and more responsibilities. As you gain more responsibilities, you acquire new titles!

Titles are sometimes interpretive, as they can represent different jobs from one end of the spectrum to the next. For instance: an accounting clerk could mean anything from somebody who is a filing clerk (which means somebody who files documents pertaining to accounting), to a receptionist (who does the same similar types of tasks).

With all the talk of career advancement, you may be wondering what some options are. Staff Accountant, Controller, and CFOS are more predominant accounting careers, though there are many more beyond just them.

Staff Accountants jobs vary based on company size. If the company is smaller, they generally have the Staff Accountant perform a variety of tasks. They keep record and track of activities done day-to-day. They also may apply cash to invoices, pay the company’s bills, and bill customers. If, however, the company is larger, they generally have clerks do much of the above-mentioned work, in which case, the clerks give the results to the Staff Accountant to be further reviewed.

Controllers generally oversee the entire accounting department. The Controller also makes sure tax information is accurately completed, sometimes with help with other accounting departments. They do this, and make predictions based on the history of the accounting records and on how well the company will do.

The Corporate Financial Officer or, “CFO” oversees the accounting department, and sometimes the finance department.

There is so much room for advancement when choosing a career in accounting from being a Staff Accountant, a Controller, or a CFO that pursuing accounting is a very wise choice. Even if you decide not to further advance your career, a stable career in accounting may just be right up your ally. With all this in mind, you will wonder why you did not consider accounting sooner.

Closely related to working capital is the business cycle. In general, the business cycle is the same for all businesses. For you, however, the timing and issues are different depending on what industry you are in. I want you to learn about the business cycle because it is the rhythm of your business cycle that undermines all of your decisions.

The business cycle keeps time for your company. The pace of your business cycle will determine how much working capital you have. Like a carefully engineered machine or a finely synchronized orchestra, your business cycle is influenced by everything you and all your employees do.

The business cycle is a closed system that really begins when you purchase raw materials or something to resell. If you are in the service industry, then you are buying labor or maybe expertise.

Let’s look at the business cycle of Claire’s Chocolates. On Friday, Claire places an order for 200 pounds of dark chocolate at $3.35 per pound. The delivery comes in Monday morning and Claire is ready to make her weekly supply of fresh hand-made chocolates. All week, she single handedly makes and sells the chocolates in her shop. By Friday evening when she locks the doors she has sold every pound of chocolate. In fact, she can not even open the store on Saturday because she is out of chocolates.

Claire checks the register and discovers she has earned $1,398 because she sold all 200 pounds of chocolate at $6.99 per pound. Wow! She takes the money to the bank. Let’s take Claire’s weekly activity and apply a business cycle perspective.

On Friday, Claire placed a chocolate order incurring $670 in current liabilities because she put the 200 pound chocolate order on her supplier charge account. Come Monday she converted the $670 worth of raw dark chocolate to hand-made chocolates. She then sold the hand-made chocolates, further converting the $670 from raw chocolate to shelf inventory to cash.

By Friday, what started out as a purchase order to the supplier was turned into cash for Claire’s bank account. How? All by the business cycle. It is remarkable how it all happens so quickly. But you can also see where the pitfalls lie.

Does Claire get to keep all of the cash she made? Of course not. Claire still has to pay off the $670 she owes her chocolate supplier. And Claire has other expenses too - electricity, plastic wrap, boxes, refrigeration. Still, if we were to pause the business cycle of Claire’s Chocolates on Wednesday we could calculate her working capital.

To keep this illustration simple, let’s pretend the only thing in Claire’s business cycle is the 200 pounds of dark chocolate. Realistically, she is making and selling all varieties of chocolates.

So on Monday, if we calculate the working capital, we get current assets of $670 for raw chocolate inventory. But Claire also has a current liability of $670 for the same raw chocolate. By Monday afternoon, however, Claire has moved the raw chocolate into a shelf ready hand-made chocolate inventory. Due to the added value, her inventory is now worth $866.

Claire now has $866 minus $670, equaling $196 in working capital. By Friday, when Claire has converted all of her chocolates into cash she will have $1,398 minus $670, equaling $728 in working capital. Then Claire gets to decide how to use the working capital.

The key to managing your business cycle is velocity - keep things moving. Like Claire, you can convert your inventory to cash rapidly by operating efficiently. When your inventory sits around, your business cycle is stalled.

A common business cycle problem for many small business owners is the final step where you book your sales. Small companies spend so much time on operations and customer service that they never get around to doing the billing.

If you do not get to your invoicing then your business cycle is stalled. Jump start your cycle and keep things moving so you can bring in cash to fuel your growth to make more cash.

One of the hottest trends in the outsourcing field is online payroll processing. As long as you have access to the Internet, you can have a payroll processing company available to you at all times. You can even print your paychecks from your desktop computer once you have given all of the information to the payroll outsourcing company to prepare the checks.

These advantages, convenience and professional support, have made online payroll processing a very attractive alternative for businesses. These companies will set up all of the information for proper processing of you payroll.

A company manager can input employee information at any time and the information is stored. Only when the information is transmitted to the payroll outsourcing company will the payroll be processed. This means that changes such as new employee, address changes, etc. can be entered when they are received instead of all information having to be keyed in at the busy time when payroll is being prepared. It is recommended that a separate computer system is used for this purpose to avoid security risks.

It is easy to understand why web based payroll processing by outsourcing has become so popular. A company has the choice of going directly to the providers website and inputting all the necessary data, and the payroll processing company then does all of the calculations. Since the security of this sensitive data is so important, secure socket layer encryption is used to prevent anyone else from accessing or changing the data. These secure data centers have multiple firewalls for safety. Alternately, the company can store all of the information on its own computer and then transmit that information to the payroll processing company when the payroll date approaches.

Another distinct advantage of online payroll outsourcing is that it virtually guarantees that payroll taxes will be paid on time. Companies can also more readily supply credit information for an employee because this can be done directly with the bank. A company considering online payroll outsourcing should research the available options and make sure they choose the outsourcing company that will give them quick, accurate results while providing top notch customer support.

A really big benefit, however, is the ability to rely on accurate accounting reports and not have to be concerned with audit problems or sarbanes oxley. Outsourcing will take the risk off of your company and put it on the outsourcing company (check your contract). When it comes to audit and sarbanes oxley (if your company happens to be public), you do not want to fool around at all.

In general, capital is a term used to define resources used to make money. Basically, you use capital to make something else. If you are interested in economics, there is a lot to learn about the concept of capital as an input into the production process.

But we are talking about accounting and finance for your small business, so we will lean towards the accounting interpretation of fixed capital. In practical accounting terms, you can think of fixed capital as fixed assets. The fixed capital assets are used to make something which is then sold for revenue. This is how you convert your capital to cash.

If you want to see your capital, pull out your balance sheet and look on the asset side. Do you see machinery, buildings, trucks, or trailers? If your balance sheet does not include that level of detail you may need to ask the accountant for an asset listing. For those of you who are already hands on, you may have created the asset listing yourself.

In addition to your fixed capital, you should have some working capital. The working capital is what you use everyday in operations - think of it as your on hand capital. Remember from our earlier discussions that resources like inventory and raw materials are assets?

If you take your current assets, like cash, raw materials and inventory, then subtract your current liabilities, like accounts payable, you will get your working capital. Hopefully, the amount of working capital you have is enough to get you through a few weeks of tough times. The working capital is what you need to manage everyday because if you do not, it will diminish and you could run out.

Running out of working capital is bad because that means you are off balance. Your assets, including cash, will begin to pale against your liabilities. It is not easy, however, to manage the working capital. It takes hard work and understanding. We will talk a lot more about working capital in lesson two.

Most small businesses begin getting capital when they first start out. You plan to make money and you need to have some capital to use in making money. Some small businesses can take off from the beginning and do not need another infusion of capital.

If your business is growing at a rate that lets you reinvest earnings and keep growing then you might not need to look for more capital. But some business plans require regular infusions of capital, especially in the beginning growth stages, to stay on target.

It is okay to need more capital so long as your growth plans and future profits can support the payback of more capital. Some capital is secured through collateral and is not really at risk until you can not make a payment and the equipment is taken away. This could have disastrous effects on related parts of your production system.