cost control
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Pay Right and in Time, but Don’t Pay Twice
Imagine that you run a department like Accounts Payable. You hire more or less the right number of people. They focus on processing invoices. You pay suppliers more or less in time. From time to time minor issues occur, but your suppliers are happy in general. Time later, the company, like any other business, goes…
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Never Look at One Single Ratio
“This year we have grown 20% of sales compared to the previous year and we hit the 2 billion euro in revenue!”. I’m sure you have heard of this several times in one way to another. Companies that celebrate they made more sales, kept expenses under control or expanded to new markets. This sounds as…
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The Concept of Value
I have a friend who works as an electrician. Once he was called to fix a switch that wasn’t working. He looked at it, and in less than five minutes he fixed it. After that, he charged him for his services. His customer pointed how come he had to pay that much for a job…
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What is Wealth?
The answer to this questions might seem a little abstract. Usually, when we think about wealth, things like money, properties and other sort of assets come to our minds. However, the definition of wealth is much broader than that. Some books refer to it as the time that you would be able to live in…
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Margin of Safety
One of the difficulties when starting a business is predicting the volume of sales and costs in the future. You don’t need to be a genius to guess that it’s impossible to know exactly what is going to happen, either if your product will be a complete success or that a competitor will launch another…
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Revenues and Costs, Some Aspects
I’ve been living abroad for a while, as many people are doing these days. A common topic of discussion among expats is the salary you can earn in a certain country. It is funny to see people who move to countries like the United Kingdom, the Netherlands or Germany to find not only opportunities but…
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Don’t Only Work Hard, Be Also S.M.A.R.T!
You wake up in the morning determined to start a brand-new day. Your business requires your immediate attention in all areas: providing services or delivering goods to your existing customers, finding new customers, pay to suppliers, administrative work, developing new products… The moment you realise, it’s time to call it a day, have dinner, spend…
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Value-added Tax (VAT)
When I check social media, I hear often freelancers or small businesses complaining about having to pay the VAT they charge to their customers. In countries like in Spain, from the moment you start a business, you’re obliged to collect this tax to your customers and pay it to the tax authorities. In other countries,…
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What is ROI?
You have a pool of available funds that don’t require an immediate use in the company. Then you decide to invest it and you look at different options in the market: stocks, deposits, bonds, a new machine, a computer, a building… It doesn’t matter, the most important is that it meets the definition of an…
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Understanding bad expenses and bad debt
Thanks to the earnings of our company, we may have the desire to buy something that makes us feel good. Maybe a new car or a house, because our family is growing, or that fancy mobile phone that takes high quality pictures and go on holidays to the most remote location on Earth. Sometimes, when…