10 pages bus
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French Bakery: Financial Control-Bookkeeping and Accounting System
Kawtar Ben Hadouch
Southern States University
BUS480
French Bakery: Financial Control-Bookkeeping and Accounting System
Bookkeeping and accounting systems give a business great prices and an assortment of bakery products, which helps the business to manage its finances and accounts. The accounting process should not be difficult, so the best software should be found. Thanks to cloud development, various accounting programs can help small businesses gain control over their finances. Each accounting program has essential business features and automation that ensure business accounting is a breeze.
For the French Bakery, we shall use the FreshBooks program. Initially, FreshBooks used to be an invoicing software with fewer bookkeeping tools. However, double-entry accounting helped propel FreshBooks to become a comprehensive accounting solution for microbusinesses. FreshBooks program does a business to detect and rectify an accounting error easily. It is a program that is easy to use and free of accounting jargon. FreshBooks is the best accounting program for the French Bakery because the organization looks for simplicity, strong invoicing, and good customer support. For a small business, every single mistake results in a major headache. However, with FreshBooks, convenient customer support is always assured. The pricing of FreshBooks is convenient. It has three pricing plans that range from $ 15-$ 50 monthly. All the program features are included in every plan to ensure all levels have billable clients. Other features of FreshBooks are; a straightforward user experience, attractive UI, its set up is simple and easy to learn, time tracking, reports, expense tracking, and customized invoice templates.
French Bakery will have an accountant tasked with keeping the firm’s financial records. The accountant will be performing a wide range of finance-related tasks either for the company or for individual customers; all of these tasks are meant to benefit the organization. The roles and responsibilities of the accountant will include; ensuring the accuracy of all French Bakery’s financial documents. The documents kept must also comply with the relevant business laws (Barnes, Blake & Howard, 2017). They will also prepare and present the organization’s financial reports to the management. Preparing tax return statements and ensuring the company pays the tax is also a role of the accountant. The accountant will also evaluate the business’s financial operations and recommend the best practices to ensure French Bakery runs smoothly. The accountant will be required to act honestly and act according to the legal obligations to avoid negligence in the performance of their roles.
Sales and Marketing Control
In the bakery sector, there are a lot of activities that are beyond the control of entrepreneurs. For example, changes in marketplaces, customers adopting new buying habits, and pandemics like the COVID-19 may also occur and slow down the operation of a business. However, there are other happening that an organization can control, for example, training employees to ensure they serve customers better, tracking the number of orders made by clients daily, or noting down the number of times clients follow up on new leads or customers. Sale activity metrics involve measuring things that a firm can control directly. Sales activities are monitored by analyzing the sale activity metrics; these represent the performance and behavior of the customers and the sales teams. They include the number of prospects that the sales team contacts daily or the number of clients they serve daily.
It is difficult for an organization to decide the sale activity they will track, but figuring out the strategies they can use to assess it is worth any organization’s effort. It is the best way for entrepreneurs to know whether they are on the right track and take the best steps to improve their companies, support employees, and deliver the best experience to their customers. Sale activities will be monitored by assessing the number of leads the French Bakery creates daily. Leads refer to the number of prospects the sales team interacts with each day, the number of customers they serve, the number of orders received, and the complaints recorded by clients (Mohapatra, 2017). The sales team should be setting a daily target before embarking on their roles; by the end of the day, they must determine if they have achieved their target. After all, an organization cannot close deals unless it fills its sales metrics with new prospects. Setting the daily target prospect involves finding new deals that align with the customers’ profiles. The sales team will use SPOTIO’s Lead machine to capture the sale activities. With this tool, the user selects the target territory from the available demographic data to create the customer profile. The user will then import all the identified prospects and use them to make an outreach.
Fig. 1.0 Customer Cards of French Bakery
Running a bakery shop is all about numbers; for example, the number of cakes sold within a specific period, how much the organization is spending on ingredients, and the cost of production and sale. If the bakery management does not set some time and analyze these numbers, the organization will lose track and start making a profit. Starting a bakery business is also not all about making money but ensuring customers enjoy a delicious menu. However, entrepreneur deserves to be rewarded for their hard work. Apart from the data on the sales made by the French Bakery, the organization will also keep a record of the profit and income forecasting. It is difficult for an organization to plan without tracking its income and profit. When an organization tracks its total income and the total outgoing, it gets a clear picture of whether it is successful or unsuccessful; this knowledge ensures the business flounders and moves towards achieving the set outcomes (Barrow & Barrow & Brown, 2021). Profit and income are tracked in an organization by creating a spreadsheet, then tracking the total of each of these elements and using the comparison information to track the business growth or identify holes within the organization where income can be increased or cost reduced.
Other Business Control Plans
Business control plans are used to regulate the operations of a business to ensure it stays within the set regulations. Some guides and procedures are developed to protect businesses; these make up the control plans. Control plans that the French Bakery can adopt a top-down control and proactive control. In the top-down control, important decisions of running the French Bakery will be made by the high-level executives then the information will flow down to the employees; however, the organization has to involve the employees when coming up with the decisions. Managers use proactive business control to solve a business issue before it escalates. Sometimes the problem is also solved before happening. The managers analyze the risk and take actions that will encourage business growth.
References
Barnes, C., Blake, H., & Howard, T. (2017). Selling your value proposition: How to transform your business into a selling organization. Kogan Page Publishers.
Barrow, C. & Barrow, P. & Brown, R. (2021). The business plan workbook: a step-by-step guide to creating and developing a successful business, tenth edition.
Mohapatra, D. R. (2017). Economic and Financial Analysis of Infrastructure Projects: An Edited Volume. Educreation Publishing.