Ok, so it’s easy to congratulate the winners from the ACE NPO review but the next question is how do we help those who are on the blunt end of the dis-investment? Well, the Culture Benchmark can certainly help you explore the business models of organisations in your sector, region and of a similar size Read the full article…
Tag Archives: financial
The value of benchmarking when the past is not an indicator of the future
We’ve been talking to various people who are considering using the Culture Benchmark because they are going through significant infrastructural change. The challenge for an organisation who is refurbishing their building or moving into new and different facilities. The challenge here is that if you’ve been running a 350 seater theatre and you will soon Read the full article…
Investment Matters – Creative Industries meets Investment Finance
This summary video gives an overview of the challenges of connecting Creative Industries to Investment structures that were covered at Investment Matters in 2008. The message of the need for a bridge or a translation between the values of the creatives and the values of the investor clearly came across fairly strongly the question is Read the full article…
What’s the difference between your ideal rate and the minimum you’ll accept?
In the last post on the subject of how you price time, we looked at what your ideal daily rate would be. In this post we’ll look at how you might actually offer a range of rates (you might not publish this but you might negotiate it) depending on what the work is and how Read the full article…
How much time can you sell?
This post is aimed at those businesses who essentially sell their time (and the time of others) and looks at what assumptions you can make about how much time you can realistically sell per annum. Q1 – What would you like to earn per annum? Let’s start with the simple version i.e. a freelancer or Read the full article…
How not to tie up your cash in stock
Looking at the benchmark data for 2008-9 for those of you who make ‘stuff’ it looks to me like quite a few of you hold substantial amounts of stock. We reckon that holding too much stock is bad for cashflow, is a whole load of risk (there’s no guarantee you’ll sell it) and is not Read the full article…
What should you look at monthly in your finances?
Just in case you hadn’t realised this – doing you book-keeping is for your benefit not the tax man’s!
Sorry to shout but it’s not about doing your books because you have to for tax purposes. It’s about doing your books so that you can use the information to help you make better decisions about your business.
This means that you should be doing your books at least once a month so that you have up to date information!
Do you have enough income to enjoy Christmas and the January sales?

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a better idea of what your forward income looks like?
Here’s a process to help you achieve exactly that.
What should I actually do with my receipts?
Having and using book-keeping software is one big step towards good financial management. You also need to know what to do with the physical receipts you gather so here’s an outline of a simple process:
Goal – don’t leave your data entry to a once a year or once a quarter task. DO IT WEEKLY OR MONTHLY.
Just because an invoice is now paid doesn’t mean you’re free to spend the income!
When a client pays an invoice you don’t get to spend it all. It’s not all your money! The question is how much do you need to put aside to cover your tax bill, your costs of pitching for and delivering business and your ongoing admin/office costs? As a really rough rule of thumb we Read the full article…