Business toolbox

To complement the range of guidance and help available through the business support sections, we have created a business toolbox.

The toolbox includes a range of free to request business documents to support you with the planning, management and growth of your business.

Email us employmentsupport@westnorthants.gov.uk to request your toolbox that includes:

• Business Plan: Every business can benefit from having a written business plan. A business plan can be used as a roadmap – to help review where the business is now, where is it going, and most importantly what the best route to take is to reach the ever-changing destination. A business plan will likely be required when a business is looking to access finance through either loans, grants or external investment
• Business Modelling Method: Does your business strategy lack clarity? Do you have a lot of ideas but not know where to start, or which actions to prioritise? The business modelling method will help you to create a one page assessment of the critical success factors that hold the most value to the customers of the business
• Marketing Plan: A marketing plan will help a business understand its customers, competitors and market environment much more thoroughly. It will help it to develop a marketing mix that customers will find highly attractive
• SWOT Analysis: Identify and evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats of the business. This provides the business with an overview of what it does well, helps to identify areas in need of improvement, and minimizes risk from external factors
• Cashflow Forecast: “A plan without numbers is a business dream”. The cashflow forecast helps a business plan its future incoming and outgoing cash flows, to make sure it doesn’t run out of money. Even profitable businesses can fail if they cannot access funds to pay their bills on time. The Cashflow Forecast can help to plan for seasonal sales variances or the impact of late customer payment, providing the foresight to act before cashflow difficulties arise
• Income and Expenditure Tracker: Use the tracker to log the day to day sales and expenditure of the business. Keeping these simple to use records provides an up to date overview of the business’ financial performance and will aid the creation of an end of year tax return
• Profit and Loss: Profit and loss accounts are used to reflect upon total income and expenses from historic trading activity. The profit and loss statement provides total overall cost figures over a period of time, and can be used to evaluate the impacts of indirect costs on profitability

Last updated 17 August 2021