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Financial Forecasting

Financial forecasting is a fantastic tool for every business to use to improve your financial performance. Financial forecasting can help you with every aspect of your business and make sure you are prepared for any potential financial problems.
Roger Hatherall & Co support all businesses throughout Bath and the surrounding areas. We can always provide financial forecasting to you and your business.

What Is Financial Forecasting?

Financial forecasting is the process used to estimate and predict how a business will perform in the future. This planning tool can be useful for the majority of business to see what your cash flow could be like over the next week, month or for even longer periods of time such as the business year.

Using a financial forecast, you can build an entire financial forecast which will give you information regarding all your revenue and expenditure. Having this forecast reported will allow you to minimise expenses with a budget and give you a set income target to achieve. Financial forecasts can be as detailed as you like, accounting for all possible transactions or simply giving you an overview of different costs and income.

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Creating Your Goals

One of the most important factors of a financial forecast is to help your business create both short-term and long-term goals. Financial forecasts will give you an overview of the profit or loss you expect to make during a business year or over the course of a month. For the near future, monthly targets are essential to help your business flourish. By giving staff members and different departments targets they must meet, you can raise income and keep your business ticking.

With regular short-term targets being created through financial forecasts, your long-term goals can then be created. Most business owners look to improve and grow their business. By motivating staff members in the short term, this leads to achieving your long term goals and making a healthy profit over the course of a year. With these funds, any business can begin to grow. This process is made much easier with effective planning through financial forecasting.

Controlling Budgets

Another great benefit of using financial forecasting is being able to create dependable budgets for every area of your business. Every business must budget effectively to limit cost and make sure you do not go overboard with your spending. However, this can be difficult without a good understanding of how much your business will be making and needs to spend in the future.

Once you have forecasted how much money should be spent over the next month or year, this allows you to budget each department in your business. By limiting your spending, you maximise your profit margins whilst also cutting out any unnecessary payments. With your budget being kept low, this also helps you save money if you need to deal with an unexpected payment, so larger costs should not have a massive impact on your business.

Planning For Resources

Whether its equipment, materials, new staff or cash investment, it is important to know what resources your business needs to get certain projects done. Financial forecasting is again an excellent tool to use in this situation. Financial forecasting can help you plan for all areas of your business whilst knowing exactly what funds you have available to invest into the business.

Whilst financial forecasting should be accurate, it is also important to stay flexible so that you are prepared for any potential hiccups. Not everything will go exactly to plan and being prepared for different scenarios will mean your business remains successful no matter what happens.