What does a finance department do?

Direlights is a local student ran company that is a space for students such as me to take risk and learn about varying components of a business. They focus on producing candles and will hopefully expand their product line this year!

I read an article about what responsibilities a finance department has and the benefits it provides to a business

. From this article I learned that a finance department has some main components, Outside Investment, Inform business financials, and Boost profits. First is outside investment which means knowing opportunities for potential investment into the business. Finance is key to this as they identify and make sure that all bookkeeping is quality and honest in order to ensure trust from investors. Another component is informing business financials, which means keeping track of sales and cost, while informing the company of such in order to build around our financial limits and also to expand with such information. This can be super important especially when you go in depth, because maybe your sales are looking fine but past consumers are decreasing purchases but new consumers are covering for those lost sales. Finance can help catch these small things and can help figure out why and bring up returning customers' purchases. Lastly, boosting profits can be seen in multiple ways, one of those ways is cutting costs that aren't bringing in any benefits to the company, or renegotiating loans, or contracts with businesses that provide you with capital (Machinery/Labor). These changes can be beneficial by increasing profits and saving the company if there financial stress is placed on it. 

After reading the article I am even more excited to be part of the finance department because it provided me with an overarching view of the work I will be doing but also some ideas. I actually had one idea that I would like to try, I would like to start collecting some data after every sale we make where we ask the customer if they have purchased a candle before. This data after adding all sales will tell us if we have a high or low return purchasing rate. If this comes out as high I would like to offer a discount that is marketed through social media and sales events where we offer a 20% discount to returning customers. The goal is to increase sales but also build strong long term trust and favorability over other companies from our customers. The discount could be modified depending on what our cost for supplies are!