Business_Plan

Burpies Business Plan By Cara Raske Welcome to Burpies, a company created by moms for moms. Burpies is a company that understands what one less step means in a busy mom’s day; a few more minutes for her family. The main goal at Burpies is to provide quality products that not at an affordable price. Our family here at Burpies invites you to invest in a company with tried and true values. For starters let’s explore the basic background of Burpies. The company is founded by me, Cara Raske and Tina Moore. We are not only mothers but business women as well. We have decided to start this business together and thus, have formed a partnership. The advantages of forming a partnership are easy set up of the company, both claim profits and losses on personal income tax returns, and we both bring different experiences and knowledge that have benefitted the company. We have formed Burpies to provide a wonderful line of stain resistant baby products. Burpies offers burp clothes, wash clothes, bibs, sheets, towels, and blankets. The catch is that they are not the normal run of the mill baby items. They are all produced to be stain resistant and this formula has been patented. We will provide our consumers with demonstrations, promotions and warranties. We will launch all our products at once but using the burp cloth as our signature item. Are goal is to use the burp cloth to gain household recognition and trust. We will also provide online promotions and samples to entice consumers. As for managing the financial side of the business we have researched and planned accordingly. We have invested our money personally and have now leased the factory, equipment and purchased materials. We have yet to hire and train personnel. We first wanted to gain the feel of the cost prior to employing a staff. Knowing how much it will take to produce our products was where we wanted and though it necessary to start. We know how much that will be and that will be an average of $.65 per item per unit. Now we are ready to set out to hire employees. When we thought about who we would like to handle the accounting side of the business we took into consideration a few important things. We want our employees to have experience in working in a small business, understand the needs that come with that and have a background in accounts payable, accounts receivable and bookkeeping. We know that these employees must be motivated and have the ability to work with deadlines and goals. There are three areas as to which we paid the closest attention to: budget preparation, internal controls, and cash management. Being able to understand and prepare a budget is essential to having a successful business. Not only are we going to hire personnel that can handle this task we ourselves will read and understand fully what the budgets say and represent. The first task of our budget is to nail down the cost of what a unit is going to cost to make. Earlier we told you the average of all our items from that we can tell you the unit price per item: burp cloth, $.44; bib, $.23; towel $.98; wash cloth, $.37; crib sheets, $.86; and lastly blankets, $1.04. From these numbers we can now determine how much we will need to charge in order to make a profit. We still have to figure into the unit price the payroll numbers. This number will come as we determine how many staff we will house. To have a successful accounting department we must also have in place internal controls. Internal controls allow our company to have a safety net for our assets and help to ensure the accuracy of the numbers and records. We have a plan for these controls and have applied the basic principles of internal controls to this plan. We will establish responsibilities for employees and keep those separate from one another. So we have divided each accounting task or function. Selling orders to customers will be handled by the sales team. They will take the orders and input them into the computer. Then our billing person will send out the invoice to the customer. All invoices that come into the company will be entered by a separate billing employee. All invoices will then need to be approved by the manager. Once this happens the bookkeeper will then write a check to pay them. All checks require two signatures, mine and Tina’s. The bookkeeper will also record all monies that clients send in and will fill out the deposits. Next we focus on the documentation process which also incorporates an electronic control. We have purchased a computer program that allows us to create client accounts. This allows us to place the order into the computer and it allows an invoice to be printed to send to the customer. Once we receive payment from the customer we can apply the payment to the account. This creates a record in our system which allows us to stay on top of who is paying and who is owing. When we receive bills that the company must pay they are entered into the accounts payable section of this program. This enables us to produce a report of what we are paying each month. The invoices are then approved by the owners. When those invoices are to be paid the bookkeeper than writes a check using the computer program. The bookkeeper will also record deposits on this program using the general ledger modular. By having all transactions flow through one program, we will be able to see where money is and where it is going. We can run reports with this program and will be able to ensure that we have all figures because all accounting is done in one program. To maintain that our employees are keeping accurate records we will have random quarterly audits. This will be done by an independent CPA firm. This will help not only to keep our employees working hard and being as accurate as possible but it will allow for us to monitor any employee activity that may not be correct. The last measure we will take for internal controls is our employees themselves. They will have to be bonded in order to work for us in our accounting department. Having bonded employees gives Burpies yet another safety net. We will have the assurance that any bonded employee is insured and has gone through a rigorous screening. We tend to work with our accounting department to assess goals and needs. We will use all financial statements as a whole then break down into the each individual statement to help fine tune areas that need it. Being able to set goals based on previous sales will be the key. Overall we here at Burpies believe in the soundness our company’s future will have. We work as a team and in doing that we have knowledge and will power on our side. We invite you to join our family!