In recent years, SMEs in Cambodia have been growing and playing an important role in creating jobs and are a key driving force for Cambodia’s economic development.
Meanwhile, the Royal Government of Cambodia is expecting to see 70% of these SMEs ready to produce proper accounting records and financial reports to be aligned with accounting standards by 2025.
Besides getting accountants well prepared for this challenge, CAC is currently working from another front by engaging business owners through a newly designed training initiative “Finance for Nonfinance” in order to bring their attention to this challenge as well as showing them how their business goals can be achieved through a well-managed accounting system.
Most businesses in Cambodia have been observed to be family-run without proper accounting records; some are run in a one-man-show fashion with inadequate internal control system. And most of the times are formed without formal structure or corporate governance. As a consequence, most owners have become a slave to their businesses which mostly remain small even though they want to make it big. Through this Finance for Nonfinance training initiative, we hope to help SME owners achieve three below outcomes within a period of 05 years.
- Transform themselves from being cash counted business to accounting recorded business
- Make decisions based on numbers, NOT guesswork
- Work with lenders and other key stakeholders more effectively by having proper accounting records i.e. creating more options to access capital at relatively more favorable rates
In order to achieve the above three outcomes, we will provide trainings both in public forums and monthly small group discussions. The Finance for Nonfinance has been designed to cover three different levels plus extra course on Taxation for Business as follows:
Level 1: Beginners (From Nothing to Something): It is designed to cover the basic concepts of accounting & finance (mastering finance and accounting basics). This course will also familiarize participants with common key terms used in finance and accounting after which they can proceed to the next level.
Level 2: Intermediate (From Something to Numbers): It is designed for owners wanting to start digesting financial statements in order to understand what the key elements and basic ratios are to be used to analyze their businesses (making sense of numbers).
Level 3: Advanced (From Numbers to Strategies): It’s a high-level designed for business owners to use to manage their businesses effectively and efficiently. It’s a snapshot of business KPIs to drive strategies from reading the numbers through both financial and operational information (turning numbers into strategies).