Your business bank account may already be providing free digital tools.
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This article was written in collaboration with OCBC Business Banking. All views expressed in this article are the independent opinion of DollarsAndSense.sg based on our research. DollarsAndSense.sg is not liable for any financial losses that may arise from any transactions and readers are encouraged to do their own due diligence. You can view our full editorial policy here.
Frequently, new business owners will find themselves wearing multiple hats in their company such as doing HR and finance-related work. Bootstrapping feels like the logical thing to do at the start, saving you a bunch of money during a time when you’re just finding your feet.
However, you can’t do this forever. While you save some money at the start, handling all the HR and financial-related work on your own can quickly become overwhelming once your company expands. And that is also not the worst of it as you may also lose sight of growth – costing you much more in the longer term.
Bringing in capable people to help you manage your operations when you require more hands is the smart thing to do. As logical as it may sound, one of the most common mistakes that new business owners make is that they neglect to hire a finance manager even when they need one.
Read Also: 4 Things The Ex-CFO Of An SGX-Listed Company Wishes New Entrepreneurs Knew About Managing Their Business Finances
Handing over the keys (and information) to your bank account to someone else can be daunting when you do it for the first time. Nevertheless, this is a necessary step for all businesses. At the same time, companies do not scale overnight. So, your finance manager role may be occupied by a part-timer or just one person at the beginning.
This means leveraging on technology is going to be crucial to safeguarding your business finance and helping your finance manager do their job efficiently. The business bank account that you ultimately use will also determine the tools at your disposal.
In this article, we look at 3 ways that you and your finance manager can benefit from your business bank account. We take examples from OCBC Velocity, which is the internet banking platform offered for OCBC Business Bank Account that DollarsAndSense currently uses.
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One of the most unappreciated tasks each month would be calculating how much you need to pay your employees. Often, such payments do not only include their base salaries but also any claims, expenses and even additional payments such as commission or OT pay that your staff may have. In addition, you have to make both employer and employee CPF contributions.
Via OCBC Velocity, you can get your finance manager to simplify the management of your payroll by adding employees into a Payroll batch. Once your finance manager has created your Payroll batch, he or she can continue adding to it.
You or your finance manager just need to click on “Payroll”.
From there, you can retrieve your existing employee Payroll batch by selecting “Load From List”. If you haven’t created one, you can get your finance manager to start by inputting the list of employees you are paying every month.
If your finance manager is doing this, you may want to retain the ability to make the final approval for payment. So this means that while the finance manager prepares the monthly payroll batch, you are the only one who authorise salary payments. You will get a notification to verify and approve the payments before the deadline.
Similar to creating templates for employees, you can also create templates for regular invoicing to customers and/or payments to suppliers via OCBC Velocity.
Read Also: Why Open A Business Account With A Bank?
When you hire a finance manager, you may also want to review the way you are managing your invoices. You can leverage on OCBC Velocity to help you create and send out e-invoices. With e-invoices, you no longer need hard copy invoices and will never lose track of an outstanding receivable.
Read Also: E-Invoice VS Paper Invoice: What Are The Differences Singapore Companies Should Know About
Here are 4 simple steps to create an e-invoice.
Step 1: Go to “financial management”, and click on “Invoice overview: Sales”.
Step 2: Click on “Create invoice”
Step 3: Create your invoice and hit “next” (note that you may have to add new customers and/or new products if you are billing a customer for the first time or selling a new product, otherwise, you can use existing templates you’ve already created.)
Step 4: Click “Save and Send”, this will automatically download the invoice and pre-fill an email for you. You just need to attach the invoice on the email to your customer before sending it out.
After you click “Ok”, a pre-filled email will open. You can modify this email so it doesn’t look generic or spam-ish.
You can also make use of OCBC Velocity to create or upload any bills that your company has to pay. While this may take extra steps, you would be consolidating your receivables and payables in one location. Plus, with your finance manager taking over this work, it’s a good time to standardise how you monitor both receivables and payables.
OCBC Velocity also connects you to InvoiceNow, a nationwide E-invoicing method that facilitates the direct transmission of invoices in a structured digital format across finance systems locally and internationally.
The benefit of creating your e-invoices via OCBC is that the reconciliation process is also sped up – so you don’t have to constantly match or guess the source of your payments.
By consolidating all your invoices and bills in one location, you can also leverage on OCBC Velocity’s alerts system to follow up on late payments or make an outstanding payment for bills due in the month.
Subsequently, you can also track customers’ payment patterns to anticipate issues. This can guide you in making better business decisions. For example, you may offer more favourable payment terms to good customers, or choose to take more cash upfront and/or provide shorter payment terms for less creditworthy customers.
You can also link your PayNow Corporate to embed PayNow QRs into your e-invoices sent via PDF on email. This gives customers of your business more convenient options to make payments, and thus, improves your ability to get paid faster. As the only bank to offer this service for free, OCBC helps nudge your business to adopt more digital solutions.
By building a system to stay on top of your cash inflow (and receivables) and cash outflow (and payables), you can accurately forecast your future financial position.
You can make use of the Business Financial Management tool on OCBC Velocity to visualise past and current cash flow position. There’s no need to do any manual calculations. Seeing your historical cash flow positions in a chart makes it more intuitive to identify a possible cash flow squeeze down the road. You put yourself in a better position to rectify potential cash flow problems before they happen.
If you foresee cash flow constraints, you can apply for trade financing options in advance.
You may also see that you have a very healthy cash balance on hand. With this information at your fingertips, you can make better business decisions. This may include taking the decision to buy bulk at greater discounts on short notice, or being confident that you can invest in equipment and machinery to improve operational efficiency as well as to expand your business with new headcount.
Bringing in a finance manager should alleviate your routine but essential administrative duties. This should free you up to think about your finances more strategically, making it a great time to improve processes in the way your business finances are being managed.
With OCBC Velocity, you and your finance manager can make full use of the information and inputs that can be consolidated on a single platform. This provides a low-cost method to kickstart your journey to incorporating more enterprise software solutions.
By retaining the control to approve transactions that your finance manager inputs into the platform, you can do all this without losing any security. You can also stay on top of your cash flow and future inflow and outflows. This puts you in a good position to foresee problems and find remedies before they even happen.
To get the most out of your business banking account, you can also get your finance manager to join OCBC Velocity E-Training sessions. These are typically held once a month by OCBC, and will allow him or her to quickly learn the ins and outs of OCBC Velocity. This is also incredibly useful if you do not have the time to deep-dive into the features of OCBC Velocity with your finance manager.
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