In the hospitality industry as in life, it pays to expect the unexpected. We saw a striking example of just this during the coronavirus epidemic: hotels that took a fairly conservative approach to operational forecasting survived, while others failed.

Smaller shocks should be anticipated and planned for, too. If your hospitality business suffers a broken water heater or a season with very few guests, you’ll be glad to have taken this course and applied its principles.

What Is Cash Management?

Cash management encompasses the cashflow planning you are probably familiar with, but takes this concept a little further. The primary goal is to avoid a situation in which a business simply runs out of liquid funds.

If this should happen, bridging loans, lines of credit, and other sources of cash may be prohibitively expensive or simply unavailable. On the other hand, having a cash cushion in place in slow business cycles can easily become a source of competitive advantage.

 

You could, therefore, say that good cash management amounts to taking the actions you might have to when times become hard, just before they become compulsory and you have no other choice. Prudent cash forecasting thus allows you to reduce the pain of events beyond your control.

What This Course Will Teach You:

This two-hour course is relatively challenging and therefore recommended for owners and managers who already have a grounding in general hospitality management. The syllabus is not exclusively tailored to accountants, though, and essential bookkeeping concepts are briefly explained along the way.

You will learn about:

• Alternative strategies for generating revenue.
• Operational cost management principles.
• A financial model used to guide cash management in hospitality businesses.
• Practically applying this model in the form of a template.

It’s easy to pretend to be a great manager when everything is going well. It’s when the unexpected happens that leaders with good forecasting and cash management skills conspicuously rise above the rest.