RequestNow - Centralized platform for financial approval process

RequestNow’s real customers will be the Founder, the CEO, the CFO or whoever is responsible for financial metrics in a Small/Medium Business (SME). As a business owner or leader, one of the most important equations that you shall track often is Net revenue – Variable costs (cost associated to acquire or to serve a customer/order) – Expenses. Of course, apart from that, you also keep an eye on the cash level too. Other things aside, the business is considered healthy if Net revenue – Variable costs (cost associated to acquire or to serve a customer/order) – Expenses is positive (or at least following the trend that you forecasted) and you have a good level of cash. Thus, it’s important for business owners/leaders to have a financial plan, with targets for top line metrics (such as: total sales volume, margin/take rate, cost of sales, promotion cost, marketing cost, logistics cost, then G&A, other expenses, other incomes, and down to EBITDA level). It’s preferable to have a 12-months plan or longer, but it’s OK if you have only a quarterly plan or even monthly plan. Because we believe that having a plan is much better than having no plan. While we are not able to help with the Revenue part, because it’s business specific and we have no control over your operations, strategies, product, services, let us explain how we can help you to control the Expenses part. 1. Before Being Able To Control Anything, You Should Know The Current Situation First, In Detail. And RequestNow Can Help You To Know It. We understand that within an organization, there could be a lot of expenses and categories of expenses, such as: salary, purchase order to suppliers, buy inventories, buy office supplies, buy softwares, buy services from other companies, stationery, rental, perks for employees, travel expenses, and so on. As a business owner/leader, you may wonder why you’re sometimes not aware about a few of those expenses, or who is helping you to control these, or why an expense gets approved without your awareness or why you even have that expense??? All of this is mainly caused by a lack of a centralized tool for the approval process. Most of the companies usually use email, chat or messaging app to request and approve expenses. Sometimes it gets worse when a request for expense gets approved verbally. With RequestNow, we bring centralization and clarity for you where: All requests come to a single place. So that you know everything that people request and all potential expenses coming out of your budget. You don’t have to track back on emails or chats anymore. We also help you to set who has the right/permission to approve what Purchase order and within what amount. We also give you information on how much you spend today, this week or this month. 2. We Help You To Take Control On Your Budget At the beginning of each period (week, month, quarter, year), let’s have the financial plan in hand, and clearly define the threshold of budget for each expenses category. For example: For this month, your company can only spend 10.000 USD for travel. Period. After that, you can come to RequestNow, and set a limit for “Travel” expense limit/category equal to 10.000 USD, and set a warning threshold equal to 70%. Then, we will give you a warning email, if the total value of requests, within the predefined period, is reaching or greater than 7.000 USD. This mechanism will at least give you a bit of peace of mind, where you’re always sure that the expenses will not go beyond the limits you set or it will give you a warning when you’re about to. It’s pretty simple to know that if you’re not breaking the limit of each expense category, you will not break the limit of the total budget in a predefined period of time. Additionally, with RequestNow, we help you to appoint the approvers, who will help you to make the right decision within their financial power/authorization. 3. We Help You To Get A Better Working Capital Pool As we help you to control your cash with (2) above, another component that you should keep an eye on is the working capital. The best companies run with positive working capital (meaning receivables coming early and payables coming much later). But, very often that as the scale of the business grows, we come to a point that we have to pay our suppliers first, before the revenue stream from customers comes. Subsequently, it’s ideal that when you sign any contract with your suppliers or service providers, please deal certain credits with them. For example: You buy an inventory but only pay 7-days after getting the goods, or you buy a software but only pay 1 month later. Even when you’re able to deal credits with your suppliers/service providers, very often that the Accounting team is not aware of that, and as soon as the Accounting team receives a request to pay, they will immediately pay that amount, without knowing that they can pay 1 month later. This hurts the working capital of the company. With RequestNow, we recommend that all of the requests to pay (we make it generic and call all of them as “Purchase Order”) shall be accompanied by the terms of the contracts, especially the payment terms. So that the approver, and the accounting will know exactly when they need to pay. This will avoid the early payment, which hurts your working capital. If you apply this mechanism well within your organization, we believe that you will improve your working capital level and soon will come to the point of doing business with positive working capital. If you want to discuss more about any of the above, please feel free to reach out to us at : admin@requestnow.co