Improving Working Capital Management and Cash Flow Intelligence (Essay Sample)

WORKING CAPITAL MANAGEMENT AND CASH FLOW INTELLIGENCE
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Question 1
Working capital management entails a managerial accounting strategy that focuses on the maintenance of good levels of current assets, current liabilities and working capital. This enables a company to ensure a consistent cash flow that sustains the short-term debt occurrences and day-to-day operating expenses. There are a myriad of thoughts about the strategy across different corporate stakeholders historically. Thus, the current thinking of working capital management by corporate executives is that working capital costs must be as minimal as possible. This implies that the executives are highly motivated into using different aspects of procedures that revolve around the advancement in technology, organizational value techniques and elimination of all cash flow bottlenecks to reduce the high demands of working capital.
Question 2
The first best practice in working capital management is conducting transactions electronically together with vendors. This will ensure that the occurrence levels of calculation errors are reduced as much as possible. The second best practice is embracing self-service to improve the working capital, where the owner of a company should use in dependence as a tool of reducing the working capital management requirements. The third one is the management of working capital risks to ensure that no considerable losses are incurred in the transactions. The fourth one is identification and resolving of discrepancies on the front-end procure-to-pay process, where all inconsistencies in the transactions are settled first-hand. The fifth one involves leverage change management principles and practices in finance that assure a company that all cash flows are appropriately managed.
The sixth one entails application of quality and productivity tools in the improvement of working capital. The seventh one is teaching operating units on how they impact the return on working capital invested in the operations of a company. The eighth one is the usage of enterprise resource planning system to brig about the improvement of working capital transactions. The ninth one is conducting real-time analysis of the cash flown in the company to ensure a reliable working capital currently and in the future. The tenth one is centralizing and standardizing transactions to assure the company that all transactions are in line with the financial principles. The eleventh one is reducing the amount invested in the operations of working capital via th...