Like many lab managers, you’re likely a scientist first and a manager second.
Financial management may not have been the first thing on your mind when you joined your laboratory or headed your first project. However, it’s an essential skill to ensure your resources are being used efficiently and your lab is headed for long-term success.
Whether you’re new to laboratory management or just want to streamline your existing processes, here’s five best practices you can use to simplify your accounts management and payment tracking.
Have a reliable expense tracking system
Expenses getting out of hand can often be one of the biggest challenges when it comes to laboratory finance management.
To avoid this, you’ll need a reliable system for monitoring your lab’s income and spending and making sure these balance at the end of any given accounting period.
Some effective strategies to use for this include:
- Create a detailed budget for all equipment, supplies, personnel costs, and other expenses you can accurately project.
- Maintain accurate purchase records including receipts, invoices, and payment information.
- Carry out regular reviews of your spending analysis, identifying patterns, and opportunities for potential cost savings.
Once you use these techniques to develop an expense-tracking system unique to your needs and projects, you’ll be able to keep your lab operating within a sustainable budget and identify regular improvements to make your lab finances more efficient.
Optimize equipment acquisition
Equipment purchases are often a major expense category you’ll have to consider when streamlining your lab accounts management.
This is true for both the specialized, project-specific equipment you need to carry out lab work, and more general auxiliary equipment like card readers. Card readers offer a safe, contactless, and hygienic way to handle transactions. By reducing physical contact, they help maintain cleanliness in your lab whilst providing a secure payment solution.
The key phases for cost-effective equipment sourcing include:
- Clearly define the needs specific to your lab or planned project.
- Researching possible vendors and sourcing multiple quotes to compare prices and identify the most cost-effective deals.
- Calculating total cost of ownership (TCO) using accurate data on the long-term costs associated with maintenance and consumables.
- Negotiating with supplier accounts on unit prices, payment terms, warranties, maintenance service, and other costs.
By streamlining processes for equipment acquisition and consistently finding the best deals, you’ll not only increase the projects that are completed under budget but achieve a more flexible cash flow that’s easier to manage.
Onboard quality accounting software
While popular accounting platforms like Xero tend to be marketed to conventional small businesses, they still have plenty of functions with useful applications in a lab environment.
Some of the key features that can help lab managers simplify their accounts and payment tracking include:
- Automated laboratory billing solutions, which ensures timely billing and automatic reminders, rather than having to spend time and resources manually calculating, sending, and chasing invoices.
- Expense tracking features, which allow you to set up custom classifications such as equipment, supplies, salaries, and more, while syncing this information up to your credit cards or bank accounts.
- Payroll management platforms that ensure salaries are disbursed in a timely, accurate manner, both for permanent employees and temporary contractors.
By embracing these features and more at your lab, you’ll be able to automate away a variety of routine tasks related to accounts and payment management, and simplify the amount of oversight required from you.
Centralize your client and project data
As a lab manager, you’re probably required to manage several different projects and client accounts at once. In these situations, it can be easy to lose track of where payments are coming in, which services are outstanding, and other variables.
If you’re struggling with data silos, then centralizing your client and project data using an LIMS, a project management tool, or accounting software could be a great way to simplify your lab finance management.
By consolidating your client and project data in one management system, you can:
- Ensure all key pieces of data are easily accessible for you and your colleagues.
- Maintain a real-time view of the status of different projects, including the services you’ve billed for and the payments due on different accounts.
- Break down silos and consolidate your lab’s financial data for more accurate and complete reporting.
These strategies can help simplify your financial management tasks by giving you and your team one centralized place for a top-level of view of finances, and make it easier to understand how projects in-progress are reflected in your lab’s cash flow.
Use digital payment gateways
One of the easiest ways to simplify your payment tracking is to integrate digital payment gateways into your invoices.
This kind of software allows you to create unique payment links which you can include in the invoices sent to clients, allowing them to make payments through an intuitive and secure online portal.
This software can help you simplify your approach to accounts and payment tracking by:
- Automatically log payments in your chosen accounting software and match these to the invoices you send.
- Provide better visibility of your cash flow, instantly showing you when payments are made and making it easier to forecast revenue.
- Reduce the number of outstanding invoices by providing a fast and convenient payment method for clients.
With a digital payment gateway in place, you’ll make account and payment management much easier and provide a more seamless, straightforward experience for your clients.
Final thoughts
When you’re managing several projects across different client accounts, keeping your accounts and payment management streamlined can be more than a little daunting. However, with the right tools and strategies in place, maintaining a healthy cash flow for your lab will become much more achievable.
We hope these pointers have given you a good starting point to formulate your own account management strategy, free up your time, and run a more efficient lab.
