Useful Financial Calculators for Small Businesses
As a business owner, making money decisions for your business is a process often plagued with fear and indecision. Luckily, some financial calculators and tools can relieve some of the uncertainty.
Personal finance calculators and financial calculators are specialized tools that help with budgeting, loans, personal finance, and more. They can be used to compute values of investments, cash flow, and loan-related expenses such as interest rates.
A smart business owner knows the importance of planning, and using financial calculators helps one make strategic, informed decisions about money.
We’ve rounded up a list of essential free financial calculators that small businesses often need.
Business Loan Calculator
Business owners apply for business loans for many reasons: Starting up, expansion of operations, or when in need of a line of credit to maintain cash flow, among other reasons.
Business loans can greatly impact the growth of your business, but one must be careful and informed on what you are getting into before taking the leap. You must consider how much you are borrowing, interest rates, repayment periods, and more.
A business loan calculator is a financial calculator that allows you to estimate these parameters, ultimately helping you determine the loan’s affordability before you apply. It also allows the potential borrower to compare interests from many different lenders.
We like this business loan calculator because it has an added feature where calculations are made according to a business owner’s credit score, which is often overlooked. After entering the loan amount, loan term, and estimated annual percentage rates, you get business loan options based on your credit score.
Profit Margin Calculator
A profit margin calculator is a handy tool for any business owner who wants to determine an item’s revenue based on cost and desired profit margin percentage. While factors such as demand and competition may play into the pricing of a product, a common business practice is to use a gross profit margin ratio.
For example, a gross profit margin of 0.20:1 means that for every dollar in sales, a business has 20 cents to cover basic operating costs and profit. These operating costs include the cost of labor, raw materials, manufacturing, and logistics.
A good profit margin should allow the business to cover its variable and fixed expenses, and turn a profit to compensate for risk. The ratio is individual to every business. This profit margin calculator crunches the numbers and finds the final price you should charge for your products, with simple explanations on gross and net profit margins.
Budget Calculator
Managing a budget can be confusing, but having control over your finances is vital to the success of your business. A good budget planner helps you decide where to spend money while avoiding and reducing debt.
Budget calculators are generally used to manage monthly finances but can be created to reach specific financial goals such as paying off debt, getting income and expenses back on track, and reaching certain savings goals.
Business owners need to maintain a budget because if your financials are a mess, chances are this could spill over into your business. It also helps you figure out what you need to pay yourself from the business. It can be as simple or as feature-packed as you like, computing expenses such as necessities, wants, savings, and debt.
You can get a budget personal finance calculator for free online. We like this one for its basic automation and reporting, which saves time and gives insight into how you are spending your money.
Cash Flow Calculator
Managing cash flow is key to business success. Whether you’re a new small business owner or taking over your accounting in an existing business, cash flow is like the blood running through the veins of your business. It’s used for important things like covering expenses, paying staff, and buying stock.
While a business can manipulate its earnings, cash flow provides an idea about its real health. Positive cash flow, where the money flowing into your business is more than the amount leaving through accounts payable, wages, and other expenses is the ideal. A financial calculator helps you keep your finger on the pulse.
The best financial calculator is one that considers numbers such as operating income, non-operating income, salaries, monthly expenses, and one-time costs. This cash flow calculator allows for all this and is easy to use—just input all values into the appropriate fields and it will give you statistics that will indicate how profitable your business is.
Whether you’re computing taxes or trying to determine how much overtime to pay your employees, chances are there’s a financial calculator online that can help. With all the tools and support available, running a small business need not be as daunting a task as most people make it seem.
L3 Funding is one such support, offering small businesses much-needed merchant funding with quick turnover and business support. Apply now to find out how we can help you grow.