Your stock management runs parallel to your cash flow. Treat it right and it can grow in value, but manage it badly and you'll pay for it. Effective stock control affects how you manage your finances. To get it right and take advantage of your business opportunities means making your operations as streamlined as possible. You can start with managing your stock better and a clear benefit of doing so is more attractive finance opportunities with business funding in the UK.

How do employee pay demands affect business finance and how can you achieve happy, contented staff without having to pay through the nose to get it? We take a look at the issues affecting employers when confronted by employee wage demands and what you can do to put yourself in the best position to address them.

Setting Employee Salaries

Receiving increased wage demands from employees can be a delicate balancing act. On the one hand you risk paying them too little and losing talent to competitors, and on the other you risk paying them too much and crippling the finances of your business.

Having the ability to set salaries correctly from the start is a benefit new businesses can control, and it can help align your business finances to cope with increases in the future, as well as ensuring that you are within industry-standard tolerances. If your cash flow is healthy and your finances are good, then you may consider paying above industry standard in order to attract the very best talent, but that still leaves you with the same increased employee wage demands in the future.

Most business owners want to attract good talent and pay them fairly. But how can you set salaries that reflect the best-of-both-worlds scenario?

Determining the relative value of each employee

Ask yourself, 'how much value or revenue is each employee likely to bring in?' This should be the uppermost of what you can pay that employee.

For a sales person tasked with generating revenue with a profit of £250,000 per year, you might well be looking at paying them £50,000 + commission and benefits.

But the same formula might not be used for admin or support staff. Perhaps they don't make money, but they will save you some. Working out how much they can save your business is the key to working out their relative and fair salary expectations. It can certainly help you figure out the most amount of money their position is actually worth.

Finding common ground in salary expectations

There are many ways you can set about establishing either the market rate for that position or the least you are willing to pay them. Taking a look at similar jobs from online job-sites is one, and discussing employee wages amongst your networking meet-ups is another.

The chances are you won't be willing to pay top-rate for candidates, but you probably won't want to pay the minimum either, because as the saying goes 'when you pay someone peanuts...'. It is highly likely that you will be looking at a salary somewhere in between, where you are more likely to find the best talent, willing to work for a mutually commensurate salary that fits in with your business finance projections and budget.

Your assets are not only important, but they also change during your business’s lifetime. Identifying, monitoring and keeping track of them can help you when it comes to assessing your business funding opportunities in the UK.

Business Assets Are Important

Business assets add value to your business. Your assets can be both tangible and intangible and at first sight they do two jobs, firstly they can help you get business funding by helping to secure finance, and secondly they are the intellectual driver of your business idea.

For many SMEs and business owners the prospect of setting up the workplace pension scheme has been fraught with additional costs, labour time and effort. But the risks of not doing so are much heavier. Here is a guide to how auto-enrolment dates will affect your new business and how you can use small business finance to balance the costs.