Starting a meaningful conversation about finances with your clients often begins with finding a pain point. In business and beyond, we’re always looking for ways to save money so we can do more with what we earn. When your client asks: “Where exactly is my money going?” or “Where can I cut costs?” taking a look at cost of goods sold (COGS) and operational expenses, in particular things like rent or labour, is a good place to start.‍

If your client is looking to free up working capital to reinvest in their business (or their dividends), you can use their data to see if, and where, it’s possible to cut operational costs.

You’ll want to determine: where does my client spend the most money on their business on a monthly/quarterly basis? Is there an opportunity to strategically shift their use of capital based on what the data tells us?

The Advisory Studio by Chata can help you answer these questions and lead you to deeper investigation so that you can provide strategic advice and empower your client to make informed decisions about where expenses can be cut.

In the Advisory Studio, you can simply ask “Total operating expenses by account last year by month” and find where your client spends the most money on a regular basis. Easily select a heatmap visualization to show your client where the bulk of their expenses accumulate each month.

Maybe you notice that following wages and taxes, rental costs are particularly high. Now you can establish whether there are options to decrease rental costs: if the client rents out more than one office location, is there a chance they can consolidate them? Encourage remote work to take place? Decrease rented storage space?

While rent is an operational cost, you can also take a look at COGS data to determine if certain products are worth the cost of renting storage space, for example. It’s easy to create high-impact Dashboards that show an overview of trends in your client’s COGS with Chata. Including heatmaps or graphs is as simple as typing in “COGS by product (or tracking category) by month last year.” You can include “Revenue by product by month last year” and/or “Profit by product by month last year” to offer a comprehensive picture of which products might be costing more than they are worth.

Perhaps you find that the cost of storing one product is significantly driving up the rent. With this information, you can easily show your client where they might be able to reduce COGS and rental costs at the same time, freeing up that valuable working capital. When you back your expert advice with data-driven insights, your clients will reach their goals, faster.