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The sixth cause of poor cashflow - Overheads are too high

Anna Stubbs • April 19, 2024

Overheads isn’t typically a place where you will find a lot of wastage. Our experience is that business owners are very careful about managing their expenses, and the smaller the business, the truer that statement is.

Having said that, as a business grows, so do the layers of hierarchy. Management control can deteriorate, and the business can become a bit flabby. The trick is to trim the fat but not the muscle when evaluating your expenses.

As an absolute minimum, every business should do a thorough review of its overheads at the same time every year, so that it becomes a natural routine.


Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  1. Do appropriate managers and key staff have individual expense budgets? If so, how are these managed?
  2. Have you conducted a formal review of all debt service costs and related fees?
  3. What policies and cost control processes are in place for sales staff? Include all working away allowances, vehicle reimbursement expenses, entertainment, and credit card use.
  4. What was your total marketing and advertising spend for the last 12 months? Have you analysed each component of spend based on effectiveness and results to the business?
  5. When was the last time you renewed your IT support contract? Have you negotiated a fixed monthly fee? If so, is your current fee and contract appropriate (consider migration of services to cloud)?
  6. List all subscriptions you pay monthly for SaaS cloud services. Are you using all these services and on the right plan for each? Conduct a cost-benefit analysis.
  7. And finally, do you consider your accounting fees a cost or an investment? If they’re a cost, you need to reduce them. If you’re getting value from your annual spend with us, maybe you should invest more to get better business outcomes!


Best practice for keeping control over spending is to set budgets and monitor them monthly. Talk to us about the best way to do that. We can show you the impact reducing your overheads can have on your cashflow.

Making Tax Digital to be extended to more sole traders and landlords

By Anna Stubbs • April 9, 2025
Hiding in the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) announcements published on 26 March was a technical note entitled ‘Modernising the tax system through Making Tax Digital‘. This note announces that the income threshold for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax & Self Assessment (or MTD for ITSA) is to drop to £20,000 per annum for sole traders and landlords. If you fall into this category, this means moving your tax completely over to digital by April 2026. But don’t worry, let’s see what MTD for ITSA is all about.

Reducing the uncertainty: financial forecasting and planning

By Anna Stubbs • April 9, 2025
Uncertainty can be a major threat to your strategic financial planning. Being unsure of what lies around the corner makes it difficult to make those important financial decisions around operational budgets, investment and growth funding. But by using forecasting and scenario-planning, you make it easier to manage your finances and reduce some of the financial uncertainty.

What's new in Xero (Spring 2025)

By Anna Stubbs • April 9, 2025
Some great new enhancements have come to Xero in the first few months of the year, here's some important features that have been released: Enhancements to the new invoicing Keyboard shortcuts. Drag and drop attachments. Date Picker quick select. Exchange rate adjustments in the invoice. Tracking categories for invoices. Automated bill entry The ability to upload bills directly to Xero, create one or many bills by dragging and dropping multiple files. Xero creates draft bills with the key details, and the original document is attached. Other important features (region dependent) Bank feed updates (Australia adds Suncorp Bank, United States gains PNC Commercial). Simplified whole operations with improved sales orders (United States). Easier 1099 reporting and filing (United States). Streamlined tax workflow and compliance (United Kingdom). Easier reporting (United States Schedule C compliance report, New Zealand not-for-profit tier 3 & 4 PBE reports). For the full breakdown read Xero's update .
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