Business analysis

Planning

The past is irrelevant. You can only open up growth opportunities for your business by looking to the future. Business plans are used to chart medium-term earnings, financial and asset planning. Reflecting all the interrelationships in the business, they provide a roadmap of how business profits will develop and how the asset and capital structure will change over a planning horizon of three to five years. The projections contained in the business plan are not rigid, make-or-break targets, as the figures are designed to be used for analysis and discussion purposes. In particular, they aim to identify the measures that can be adopted so that these projections can be reached.

Tax planning
As well as preparing your tax returns and/or monthly accounts, of course we will also notify you in good time of future backpayments of taxes that become due or refunds to which you are entitled. You will receive a tax planning statement from us at least once a year. We can use this projection to draw your attention to liquidity shortfalls or surpluses at an early stage and sit down with you to work out appropriate solutions.

Liquidity and financial planning
You need liquidity to meet your ongoing payment obligations. This requires receipts and payments to be aligned. As well as maintaining a target level of liquidity, the role of financial planning is to identify the company’s future capital requirements. It is of crucial importance, because capital expenditure plans and profitability considerations must be aligned with the provision of capital and the maintenance of a certain level of liquidity. Both plans are often required by banks as a basis for loan origination or renewal, and are the most important tools for proactive crisis management, especially in exceptional circumstances. 

We can help prepare financial and liquidity plans, provide advice on defining the strategic groundwork needed for financing, assist you in the elaboration of financing concepts, help you prepare for financing meetings, and provide on-the-spot support for financing meetings and negotiations. Our finance experts can also give you advice on potential grants and subsidies. They will negotiate new financing concepts for you or support you when you want to modify existing lines of credit.

Our work here helps you create the key foundations for ensuring the healthy growth of your business.  Ultimately, that’s the goal of well thought-out financial planning.

Financial control

Financial control is often mistaken for some sort of supervision, but it’s actually one of the core functions of management (managerial) accounting. Efficient financial control makes financial data transparent and can provide you at an early stage with information to allow you to steer your business in the right direction in the long term. The results of the analysis are used to derive recommendations so that you can sustainably manage your business successfully at all times.
Depending on your overarching goals – whether these are continuous growth in enterprise value or maximizing withdrawals during a defined, limited period – we can support you in the analysis of quantitative and qualitative success factors for your business. Based on this analysis, we will then establish core parameters tailored to the needs of your business. The planning that builds on this documents your expectations and represents the measures needed to realize your goals.
We can thus help you focus on what’s really important and save you valuable time. A range of scenarios with appropriate implementation plans will allow you to respond promptly to new developments. Financial control tailored to your own needs uses continuous variance analysis to inform you about the current status of your business. On request, we can provide you with an illustrated financial control report whose graphics will highlight critical aspects of your business’s development at a glance. The financial control report supports the intraperiod analysis of your business position and is prepared on the basis of the ongoing financial accounts. Financial control can also help you achieve a significant improvement in your bank rating, for example.

Cost accounting

Decision-makers need a sophisticated range of information on business development so that they can respond quickly and flexibly. That’s why we take data from the financial accounts and reinterpret it in management accounting reports. However, cost increases or revenue decreases can remain undetected in individual areas or product groups if the business lines become more complex. To safeguard the long-term future of your business, we can highlight opportunities and weaknesses for you using cost and activity reports.

Cost accounting is always tailored to the specific information requirements of the business and industry concerned. The cost accounting reports provide you with information in the level of detail you have defined. They make the profitability and productivity of individual cost centers (e.g. branch offices) or cost objects (e.g. orders) transparent and thus comparable.

Capital expenditures

Because of the capital employed and the fact that it is locked up for the long term, decisions about business acquisitions or investments in property, plant and equipment entail numerous opportunities and risks for businesses. This applies equally to the sale of business activities and the release of tied-up financial resources. We can support your decision-making process through the individual assessment of the options open to you, based on subjective and objective criteria, supplemented by a comprehensive risk analysis.

We can use a financial analysis to support your financing assessments and decisions. We will summarize buy-or-lease comparisons, capital budgets and construction finance using all standard loan types for you in a comprehensive financial analysis. We can answer your questions about effective or nominal interest rates, present or terminal values, terms, payment amounts, or outstanding balances.

Tailored payment plans and profitability analyses illustrate the effects of financing on both liquidity and profitability. We can also prepare a comparison of two or more financing options