In today’s uncertain economic climate, many businesses face tighter cash flow and shifting demand. These quieter periods can be the perfect opportunity to review how your unified system supports cash control and prepare your business for whatever lies ahead.
You’ve already invested in SAP Business One – but are you fully leveraging its capabilities to optimise your cash flow?
Most businesses focus on getting the system in and stabilising operations. That’s a solid first step. But once the basics are up and running, you can usually achieve more – particularly when it comes to visibility, forecasting and control.
Visibility makes the difference
Cash pressure builds gradually – delayed payments, creeping costs, slow-moving stock – until something breaks.
SAP Business One already gives you the structure to stay on top of those things. But to get full value, the system must be active – not just somewhere data gets stored, but a platform for decisions. Bringing your entire business onto one platform helps everyone make smarter decisions that protect cash flow, from sales to purchasing.
That means you can:
- See what’s available, what’s committed and what’s overdue – in real-time
- Track how customer payment behaviour or supplier pricing is changing over time
- Detect problems early enough to take action – not just react after the fact
If you’re not using SAP Business One to stay ahead of those signals, you’re relying on habit and hindsight – not your system.
Are you using these cash control features?
When all parts of the business are connected – and drawing from the same data – decisions become faster, clearer, and better informed.
Here’s where we see SAP Business One customers getting the most value:
Dashboards and reports
Are you using the Web Client’s built-in visuals to track key metrics? Features like heatmaps, trend lines, and ageing summaries are ready to go. These can flag issues before they escalate – if switched on and visible. Real-time dashboards keep you in the loop without needing to chase reports manually.
Customer and supplier tracking
SAP Business One lets you monitor how reliably customers are paying, whether supplier costs are shifting, and which accounts are starting to drift. These patterns often emerge slowly – until they become serious problems.
What-if analysis
By creating user-defined queries and storing scenario data in user-defined tables, you can open a whole new world of discovery. For instance, test pricing changes, bulk discounts, or supplier renegotiations and see the cash flow impact immediately. SAP Business One supports this ability to customise and extend how you work with the application data out of the box – it’s just a matter of using it. For example, if you spot a customer segment where increased volume could drive margin, you could create a table to model vendor pricing changes and margin shifts and decide whether to pass savings on or hold the extra margin. Seeing all sides of a decision in one place is invaluable.
Budgets and variance reports
If you’re not setting budgets or tracking deviations from forecasts, you’re missing a key early warning system. These reports can surface margin pressure, stock creep, or slowing sales well before they hit your bottom line – giving you time to act.
Cash flow forecasting
SAP Business One can pull live data from sales orders, payables, and receivables to project your future cash position. This lets you make proactive decisions around collections or purchasing based on where cash is heading – not where it’s been.
Automation and alerts
If your team still relies on inbox reminders or memory to chase payments or run reports, you’re working too hard. SAP Business One offers recurring transactions, approval workflows, and scheduled reporting – quietly running in the background so things don’t fall through the cracks.
A system that grows with your business
You don’t have to implement everything at once. Start by replicating your current processes in SAP Business One, then gradually add features like dashboards, forecasting, and automation at your own pace. Over time, this builds clearer visibility, stronger control, and better resilience.
If your business has changed since the initial rollout – in size, structure, or complexity – your SAP Business One setup might need to change too.
We recommend reviewing:
- Dashboards – Are they still showing the right data?
- User access – Are the right people seeing the right reports?
- Add-ons – Tools like the Boyum B1 Usability Package (B1 UP) help you tailor workflows, automate processes, and uncover deeper insights.
- Forecasting and planning – Are you running cash flow forecasts weekly or looking backward at month-end?
Strong cash control depends not just on systems, but on consistent habits and engagement across your team. Embedding financial discipline into team routines is just as important as having the right tools.
Don’t leave value on the table
You’ve already made the hard investment – unifying your data, linking your teams, and creating structure across the business.
You don’t need to wait for a crisis to start improving your cash control. The sooner you start using the full capabilities of your SAP Business One system, the sooner you can make confident decisions that protect and grow your business.
Now, it’s about using that foundation to make faster, better, and more confident financial decisions – especially in uncertain conditions. The tools are there. If you’re not using them, you’re managing harder than you need to.
Want help reviewing your setup?
Talk to our team today about optimising SAP Business One for tighter cash control.
