Commercial Collections: Business Finance Booster ShotWritten by Steve Austin
If commercial collections is not part of your B2B business plan, you're losing money. Get your cash flowing again with these commercial collections secrets. Commercial collections: fixture of new B2B culture If you're in business-to-business field, or even if you're a consumer products business that works through third-party distribution channels, you probably know what it's like to check your mail anxiously each day, sifting through all bills for that payment that was supposed to have been in months ago. It wasn't supposed to be like this. If you were a good, honest businessperson who dealt with other good, honest businesspeople, "commercial collections" wasn't supposed to be part of your vocabulary.Back in good old days, an invoice or purchase order that had an established company listed in "bill to" field was almost as good as a cashier's check. Nowadays, if you're in business of serving other businesses you may find that your cash flow is less reliable than a small-time bookie's. Commercial Collections: A Personal Story This past April I finally got $2,000 a client owed me for work done in December, after spending almost as much money's worth of my time reminding them to pay. No, this wasn't one of those hand-shake deals-we had a 5-page contract specifying net-30 payment terms. Nor was this some guy with a lemonade stand. It was media division of one of largest retailers in United States. The worst part was, I trusted this client based on my experience working with them a few years before. I actually spent money on Christmas presents, fully expecting payment to come in before my credit card statement. Avoiding Outstanding Invoices Of course, you can nip this problem in bud by cultivating strong relationships with clients who pay on time. But those clients are getting few and far between-and, as I found, good can go pretty bad pretty fast. Worse, it seems that larger business, less likely they are to pay on time. "Net 10 days" might as well be a foreign language in Fortune 500 land. The long-standing advice given to B2B businesses and self-employed people is that money is in big corporations. But good luck getting it from them before your rent is due.
| | Seecrets on Investment: Tired of making huge losses in the stock market – Part 2Written by Stan Seecrets
Fundamental analysis. Fundamentals analysis says best way to predict future trends of a stock is to understand financial figures of underlying company. The fundamental analyst would calculate a theoretical value of company using cash flow analysis, recent dividends and earnings, future dividends and earnings projections plus a host of other economic numbers. If current stock price is lower than calculated value, a trader who uses fundamental analysis would buy this stock.This writer has opinion that fundamental analysis is difficult to master for it to be useful as a forecasting tool. Understanding and analyzing balance sheets and profit and loss accounts is not enough. You will need to analyze micro and macroeconomic picture as well. Often you will need to be have same knowledge equivalent to senior-management of a company you want to analyze – minus leadership and management skills. Take example of Google’s free 2 GB e-mail service. How much does it cost them? Probably about $2 yearly for each customer. Assuming 100 million internet users sign up, advertising revenues from this segment alone would provide a tidy profit. It is analyst job to provide a good educated-guess of this number. More importantly, this new signings will provide a customer base to challenge Yahoo and Microsoft. With Google’s dominance in search engine market, data mining of such a huge pool of internet users will provide them with an edge in deciding future strategies over its two nearest rivals. Try translating this to what can Google earn in next two quarters. One of better tools is Z-Score, developed by Edward Altman, a financial economist and professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, in 1968 to predict corporate bankruptcies within a two-year period. This formula has a 70-plus percent accuracy rate Technical analysis. The “price action discounts everything” premise is central to charting, also known as technical analysis. Technical analysis uses graphic representations for prices and makes uses of various quantitative techniques to forecast price trends. A technician makes profits in any market by having positions in line with price trend. When trend is up, then buy. Conversely, when trend is down, then look to sell. Technical analysis is not an exact science, but it is easy to learn and effective. Technical analysis is a good starting point for beginners. The foundation should include classical technical analysis, Japanese candlesticks, trendlines, RSI, MACD, ADX, stochastics and moving averages. Learners can complete these core topics within three to six months. With constant practice, you should be able to independently analyze and identify current trends in stock market. Most users of stock charts may only focus on daily charts. However, if users pay equal attention to weekly as well as monthly charts, picture is intuitively more complete. This is equivalent to understanding how short, medium and long-term investors are viewing markets, after all three main types of investors form market. A handful of stock charting software has this feature of showing say, relative strength index for daily, weekly and monthly values on a single screen.
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