All posts in January 2018

Avoid these Grave Mistakes in Business Plan Restaurant

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The restaurant industry is among the most lucrative businesses in the USA. In the year 2012, the overall revenue from all over the country was over 600 billion dollars! So you can imagine how profitable this business is. But you also need to realize that no business will bear fruits for you if they are not based on a sound plan, in this case a flawless business plan restaurant.

Young graduates just out of college and universities try their luck in this business. With the business plan writing companies charging a hefty amount for a customized plan, most students start to write a business plan restaurant themselves. If you are also one of them, be sure not to commit these blunders otherwise your plan will bear the look of an unprofessional one and can be out-rightly rejected in the worst case.

Preclude Yourself from Using Informal Vocabulary

A business plan can make or break your prospects of starting a lucrative business. Bu before that you have to make sure the business plan is written in a way that it is acceptable for the top management of an investment firm or the loan officer at a bank. You should shy away using words which are considered informal as your friends might like your plan very much but in the view of an investor it wont count much because of informal wording and casual style of writing.

Give Appropriate Reasoning

If you are mentioning that based on the plan, your business will make sales of over a million dollars, you should complement it with proper reasoning that exactly how will you reach that goal, what facilities and services will you offer that the customers will come back to our restaurant so that your sales will increase manifold, all within a single year.

Make a Short but Sweet Plan

Dont try to over stuff your business plan restaurant with irrelevant details, snazzy graphics and charts. In the end all that matters is a concise plan that describes how you are going to be successful in your business and what features you offer to woo your customers. You will get the grant or loan only if your plan conveys the right message in minimum space.

Your Target Market

You should explicitly define the target market in your business plan because you cannot count the whole city in as your customers. Well, everyone wants it to be and that is the ideal situation but reality is it cant be done. So you should describe the demographics and age group properly in your plan to get the investors approval.

How To Forecast Fish Farm Business Sales

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Predicting possible sales for your Fish Farm business is a very chief process; before you launch your business you must feel positive in future sales otherwise there is no point in setting up in the first place. It’s suspect you will be right on the money but if you don’t make a realistic attempt your Fish Farm business will likely not make the grade; forecasting is an important element to your business stratgey.

Your sales forecast is the fiscal projection of the quantity of turnover your Fish Farm business will make from the sales of its products or services. Your sales forecast can stand alone, but it will be closely connected to your Fish Farm business plan. It is an essential and fundamental element of the planning method and it will be a chief part of your profit and loss account and cash flow forecast.

Why bother with a sales forecast?

It is needed so you can

1. Predict your cash flow – your forecast might predict slow times of business where you may need a cash injection to pay for products or just to pay the staff for example.
2. Manage Cash flow – innermost to the success of your business, it is essential that you understand how sales forecasting contributes to the computation of the cash flow forecast.
3. Plan future resource requirements – for example, the quantity of staff considered necessary to manage your orders and provide a certain level of service.
4. Plan marketing activities – this will noticeably have a knock on effect to the sum of sales you make as well.

Quite clearly constructing a sales forecast for your Fish Farm business is crucial to your business success – you should continually re-evaluate your sales forecasts – by looking at concrete sales to your forecasted sales firstly you can measure if you have done well or not.

So what do you need to consider?

Your sales forecast should show sales by month for at least the next 12 months, and then by year for the following two years. Three years, in total, is generally enough for most business plans.

You need to consider

1. Are there any comparable products or services already being provided in the neighborhood?
2. What is the extent of the market?
3. Is the market growing or declining, and if so,by what % each year?
4. What are the major considerations for this market?
5. What might affect it in future?
6. How do cyclic factors affect purchases of your product or service?
7. Are there fashions in your business?

Who are your customers going to be?

1. What percentage will purchase?
2. Why will they cease trading from someone else to trade from you?
3. How much will you charge?
4. Can you in reality supply the products and services that you are predicting?
5. How many competitors do you have?
6. It is unlikely your business is the only one of its kind – what happens to your customers when new businesses enter the market?

The whole globe is your marketplace with the creation of the internet – but what products/services can you make available Virtually all business has a quantity of competitor(s) – how can you hoover up your competitors customers? How can you put a stop to your competitors taking your customers? Can you tweak your product prices up or down to match new customers – can you simply add or transform the services you offer to new and existing customers to mushroom your turnover and profits?

Preparing your Fish Farm business forecast

All Fish Farm businesses need to base their forecasts on certain assumptions regarding potential changes that may take place in the future. These can be quantified and could include:

1. Sector growth/decline by a certain percentage e.g. 5%.
2. Planned expansion in the number of personnel to generate an expected 20% increase in production.
3. A move to a better location that ought to produce a 40% increase in sales.

Preparing your forecast

If you sell more than one product or service, you should prepare a separate forecast for each item in your range,and forecast:

1. By volume
2. By value
3. By a combination of both value and volume.

So what are the pitfalls when forecasting sales?

1. Make sure your forecast is based on realistic, verifiable and unbiased info.
2. Do not be tempted to ignore your investigation if it showed negative results.
3. Do not make predictions only on the basis of historical performance. Keep examining at what else might change your sales in the future and alter your forecast in view of that.
4. Make sure you understand your capacity limits. Can you produce the amount of sales being forecast with the personnel, equipment and financial resources available to you?
5. Does the pricing policy you have used in calculating your sales forecast convey to what is really achievable?, or conversely, have the prices been set too low down or too high so that either way your forecast is potentially unrealistic?
6. Is your business brand new?, your business may take longer than you imagine to get recognized, and have you set accordingly realistic sales goals?
7. Have you permitted for the possibility that high sales based on an initial promotional rush may drop off, leading to a need for more intensive marketing and higher ongoing costs once initial interest has peaked?
8. When you give reasons for your sales forecasts to prospective backers – are they believable?

Riding Your Motorcycle Home On A Business Tax Saving

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You will be happy to know that the treatment of your motorbike, within your business affairs, for tax purposes is much more favourable than your motor counterparts and whilst owning a company car is an expensive business, owning a company motorcycle isnt. Javeed Baig of Gower Accountants in Leicester explains why.

Assuming you are VAT registered, you can claim upto 100% of the VAT paid on the purchase of your beloved bike. This is on the basis that you use the motorcycle only for business purposes. With a car, no matter how much you use it for business you cannot reclaim the VAT.

Motorcycle Tax Benefits

Having purchased your motorcycle, you can claim a deduction against tax for the full purchase price in your year of purchase using part of your Annual Investment Allowance of 50,000. A car typically would attract an annual writing down allowance of only 20% per year. In corporation tax terms, for the small business, this represents a saving of 21%.

Assuming the VAT reclaim and the corporation tax relief thats a whopping 36% off the purchase price of your motorbike. So you could choose to take the saving, or maybe trade up and get that mean machine that you have always promised yourself.

As with a car it is unlikely that you will use your motorcycle only for business and therefore a private use element will occur. Take the assumption that 75% is used for business and 25% is used privately. This 25% is the benefit you have derived from using a company asset and as a result a Benefit in Kind charge will arise on both the company and on you as an individual. How this benefit is calculated is where the magic lies and its where motorcycles ownership thrives and company cars dive.

The basic differences are as follows:

MotorbikeCar
Base ValueMarket Value or Purchase PriceList Price When New
% for Cash ValueFixed 20%Between 10% & 35%
Fuel BenefitFixed 20% of UsageBase 14,400 fixed

Heres an example of the potential tax benefits:
Motorcycle costs 8,000. 25% private & 75% business.
Cash Value of benefit in kind : 1,600
Reduction Due to Business Usage : 1,200
Taxable Benefit : 400
400 represents your cash value of the benefit from using the company bike. If you are a basic rate taxpayer you will pay 80. The company will pay a further 51.20 National Insurance on this.

The equivalent tax position regarding a company car is as follows:
Car Cost 8,000 List price 16,000. Some private use assumed. CO2 = 20%
Cash Value of benefit in Kind : 3,200
Reduction due to Business Usage : N/A
Taxable Benefit : 3,200
Tax At Basic Rate : 640 Company Charge : 410

Moving back to motorcycles you can see the savings on purchase would far exceed the annual cost of owning your bike through a company.

Additional Tax Benefits

In addition all safety equipment, insurance and fuel can all be paid for by the company with the Benefit in kind calculated in much the same way.

The article has been written for information purposes only and does not constitute formal advice. The rates are those prevailing at the time of writing and are subject to change.

How To Buy A Laundromat Business For Beginners

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For buying a coin-operated laundry service facility or how to purchase a laundromat business, you’ll need a little knowledge about the subject. Purchasing a coin-operated laundry business can be done by anyone. You can buy a coin-operated laundromat probably without having to worry about any additional costs or expenses. This is a business that can remain for a long time because of the amount of dirty laundry out there. The main necessity in buying a laundromat service is that you start with a solid foundation and plan. This is the most important thing you need to do before procuring or beginning a coin-operated laundry service.

The area and neighborhood is the most crutial element when building a laundromat service. When you build a laundromat service or procuring a coin-operated laundromat business, you need to ask the owner why he or she is selling. Be persistent with your questions. It is in your best interest to uncover the real reasons because you will be the one holding the bag later. It is possible that other coin-operated laundry services are available in the area or the machines are very old and need replacing, or the lease of the property will be increasing. You must do you research, and do it thoroughly.

The next thing you should be doing is to find out what you can expect to make from the laundromat business. You should establish what you intend to earn, and then do research to make sure the laundromat business in question can deliver this. Never underestimate the ability of a seller to inflate his numbers to make the business look more profitable then it really is!

You need to determine where your initial capital comes from. Your source for your startup costs can come from many different places. You can pursue a personal loan from friends or relatives. If you already have an existing relationship with a bank or other financial institution and lots of statistical information about the business revenue, you should be able to obtain a business loan from any financial institution. But with todays market, it can be hard to get the financial institutions to loan any money at all. It is fairly simple to buy a laundromat business, but maintain a reasonable profit margin is a lot harder. If you dont invest the time and research, your coin-operated laundry service could flounder.

If you are going to buy a coin-operated laundromat business or you are buying a coin-operated laundromat, you must have properly running equipment. How do you expect to run laundromat successfully without having the equipment? If you are obtaining a laundromat, you should have the laundry machines inspected by a professional service. the general status of the machinery should be taken into consideration into the price of the business. Remember, there is always some type of maintenance needed on an on-going basis – machines break down and need repair sometimes. You can perform all the maintenance on your own, or hire professional services to do the labor work for you, giving you the time to run the business.

After buying a coin-operated laundromat business, all you have to do is make sure your equipment continues to operate, correct any problems, keep it tidy and clean, and collect your money from the machines. Owning and operating a coin-operated laundry service is is relatively simple, but the difficulty is in selecting the proper location and not over-paying for a coin-operated laundry business. Whether you are building a laundromat or you want to start a laundromat service, you need to do your research.

Retail Stores And Business Transaction Management

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In the fast paced modern retail world, it is imperative that companies stay abreast of the latest technology. This is true in all industries, and retail stores are no exception. One of the first industries to embrace business transaction management (BTM) was in fact the retail industry.

Early Adaption to BTM Solutions

There are many reasons that retail stores quickly jumped on the potential shown by business transaction management. One of the most important and impressive reasons for adopting this technology into IT system’s management was that BTM was and still is very efficient in what it can produce. It makes the running of the complex IT systems behind a retail store much more effective by reducing the MTTR (mean-time-to-repair) and MTBF (mean-time-between-failures) for software problems; thus, keeping operational expenditures lower than would otherwise be possible.

BTM can auto discover and then monitor all the transactions and their dependencies in a retail order process flow. For example, it discovers the applications that check inventory, captures an order, validates the order, calculates shipping and tax, takes payment and the integrations of retail order process with demand management, fulfillment, and ERP. For each of these applications it monitors in real-time the transactions they invoke and their outcomes.

BTM is attractive because it can be tailored specifically for any size of retail store. It can be scaled in terms of the features used to the needs of the business. Then as the business grows the right BTM solution has the ability to grow right with the business. This keeps cost low, as there is no need to continually replace an existing IT system or add new layers of functionality.

Instead, the retail store can activate more complex features, or simply have them added to what they already use. On top of this, BTM software lets its users monitor and reduce the number of business impacting problems from a range of infrastructure as varied as legacy applications with their roots in the 1960s to the latest SOA and cloud-based applications. This lets users attain the highest availability and performance out of their existing IT environments at the lowest cost, instead of forcing redesign, again keeping costs to a minimum and reducing the need for a much larger IT team.

Business Transaction Management and Application Performance Management

Retail stores must be able to monitor various applications and the transactions they invoke in an efficient, timely and professional manner in order to stay competitive and provide a high level of customer service. Stock levels, sales, purchases and other important data are directly related to bottom line profits.

With a high quality BTM solution in place, real time monitoring is a reality within the system. This drastically reduces any potential problems from occurring, and ensures that the response times for any bottlenecks in the system are kept to an absolute minimum.

Application performance management takes BTM one step further. APM monitors the performance of various business processes and the IT transactions that impact the supply chain. Then through the powerful correlation abilities of a complex event processing (CEP) engine, APM turns huge data sets into useable information.

This information could involve anything from supply chain management and raw materials to tracking stock levels and cash transactions. If it involves information, BTM/APM work together to keep a business’ computer connected activities flowing smoothly. As there are multiple applications required inside the IT environment, each one performing a different function, yet needing to interact with the other applications within the system, BTM/APM is the only way to maintain control. Without a BTM/APM solution high performance and constant 24/7 availability just cannot be maintained.

The Nastel AutoPilot BTM/APM Solution for Retail Stores

Nastels AutoPilot BTM/APM solution can deal with all the issues faced by retail stores. AutoPilot’s business transaction management component improves business process execution. The built-in complex event processing engine enables deep-dive diagnostics which find bottlenecks in the system before users are impacted and business processes are disrupted. This enables IT to resolve them before they cause mission critical events that impact profitability.

The application performance management component empowers retail stores with the ability to do more than maintain control of their IT environments. It allows IT to optimize the environment. All in all AutoPilot offers one of the best solutions for resolving real-time issues quickly, cutting IT infrastructure costs and keeping customer’s happyall things that impact the bottom line.