Why Your Startup Needs Pulse for Cash Management

This guest post from business consultant Don Dalrymple explains why your business needs to be concerned about your cash flow and how Pulse can help you take control of you finances.

A hope and a dream can go a long way to motivate an entrepreneur, but it soon fades as a way to manage a growing business in the daily realities of cash management.

It's often said that cash is the life blood of a growing business. In a world where the landscape changes quickly, this has never been more true. Your unseen competitor or the lack or adoption of your new product can cause your business to have to pivot quickly.

• What if you have to spend more on a strategy you did not anticipate?
• What if you have to invest in resources in order to win new business?
• What if you have to take more risk because the game has changed?

These are questions that need more than a gut decision. You have to know your cash position at any given time to be able to make an informed and confident decision.

Furthermore, you need to be able to anticipate different scenarios and know what kind of risk you would be taking.

This is why you need Pulse for cash management and forecasting your cash decisions.

Unlike accounting software and financial analysis, Pulse helps you see what could happen in the future and the impacts that can happen from different scenarios. Here are a few ways this powerful tool helps business owners and CFO's make informed and empowering decisions:

Quantify the loss of a customer.

Sometimes it may be necessary to let a difficult customer go. Other times a customer may not want to continue to do business. Pulse helps business owners and managers to understand how much of an impact on cash flow this will have.

Know how much money you need by when.

Setting specific sales goals based on what is required for healthy operations ties your performance to your cash needs. It makes your goals real. Managers can tie their revenue targets to monthly cash cushions.

Avoid feast and famine.

Having a roller coaster of cash flow can defocus your team on larger business goals. Having a clear picture of where the dips are in your cash flow can help you come up with strategies to curb those dips far ahead of time.

Play out cost cutback scenarios.

Know what would happen if you removed some monthly expenses that may be more of a convenience than necessity. Pulse can help a business visualize what would happen and how much cash would conceivably be freed up with expense reduction decisions.

Anticipate profits and distributions.

Whether you need to find out how much of an owner's draw that can be taken or repayment to investors, Pulse allows for a quantifiable communications to stakeholders in the business.

Furthermore, anyone that needs to be tied into the financial picture of a business can readily see real-time information and future cash management impacts with their own login. This opens up collaboration and communication and makes the future clear rather than guesswork.

Running a business is hard enough when it comes to selling, product development and managing people. One area that can be made much easier is cash management.

The simple and powerful nature of Pulse can change the trajectory of a business' success with a commitment to seeing the future rather than being beholden to what is otherwise nebulous.