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Suraya Ahmad
Faculty of Accountancy, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia
* Corresponding Author
Abstract
Purpose: There is an urgent need to identify the resources influencing the problems experienced
by Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in implementing cash management practices and to have
financial sustainability. This study will also measure the relationship between cash management
practices and financial sustainability.
Design/methodology/approach: This study used a sample of 234 recipients of SMEs fund in the
service sector which are based in the main capitals of the Malaysian Eastern Region.
Findings: The result showed that employees’ accounting skills and ability, financial support and
financial management training are able to influence cash management practices. While, all
resources identified are able to influence financial sustainability.
Research limitations/implications: This study only based on a questionnaire which four
resources are tested. This study suggests a future research focus on further aspects of intangible
aspects, softer elements of the organizational resource base, competitive and psychological
factors as needed for SMEs’ business sustainability.
Practical implications: The findings of this study revealed that the resources are important to
strengthen their cash management and improve financial survival. Therefore, SME-support
agencies and consultants who work with SMEs also need to work with them in increasing
awareness and developing the talent pools required to effect continued growth and success.
In doing so, SMEs need to be guided towards a better understanding of the cash
management and financial sustainability in essence, they need to ensure that they have a
complete set of resources and utilize the availability resources in the businesses’
development.
Originality/value: The important resources are revealed as ways to improve cash management
practices and strengthen financial sustainability in corporate practice.
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Introduction
In the year 2016, the Malaysian Government has organised 148 enhancement programs with
financial allocation of RM2503.4 million which involved 453,945 SMEs in Malaysia as part of
its aggressive effort to help SMEs (SME Corporation Berhad, 2017). Majority regulators across
the world are also increasingly organised many enhancement programs. However, such programs
did not guarantee that SMEs can sustain their business since there are the issue on how small
businesses can be transformed into growth-orientated firms without the appropriate strategies,
and poor cash management skills (Cooney, 2012). Consequently, business operations would be
affected by the failure to have efficient cash management. This issue was also highlighted by
Mbogo (2011) which showed that three out of five businesses failed within the first three years
of operation. This shows that in order to be successful in business, entrepreneurs must possess
good strategies and ensure that they can achieve their targets. Ali, Omar, Nasir, and Osman
(2018) also revealed that knowledge of entrepreneurs in accounting, costing and budgeting are
able to help business to sustain in the market.
According to Gilbert, Nelson, and Nicholas (2013), problems in cash management practices
occur when the management takes for granted on the importance of managing cash. Due to this
inappropriate action, lack of attention given to cash management but focus more on purchasing,
allocating and distributing the resources (Ali et al., 2018). This will directly affect the business
operations. In this light, when businesses do not implement an effective cash management, they
will be unaware on any potential losses in the business. Subsequently, they will rely on loans
when the businesses realise the loss and the need to recover. This will cause the closure of
businesses when they fail to improve their cash to cover the losses and are unable to pay their
loans. Based on the issues of resources availability, cash management practice and financial
sustainability, this study aims to investigate the influence of resources availability to cash
management and financial sustainability among the micro and small enterprises in services sector
in the East Region of Malaysia.
This study has several contributions. First, this study provides some insights on the issue of cash
management and financial sustainability of SMEs. The paper proceeds as follows; section 2
elaborates the literature review on cash management and the influences of resources availability
(i.e. employees’ accounting skills and ability, financial support, financial management trainings,
and technological support) on cash management and financial sustainability. Section 3 describes
the research method, including sample selection and instrument used. Section 4 presents the
results of the study while the final section concludes the study and addresses its limitations and
suggestions for future research.
Literature Review
Cash Management and Financial Sustainability
Cash management is the process of managing a business’ cash and short-term investment in
order to ensure the solvency of the business (Attom, 2013). Moreover, cash management
emphasises the efficient use of a company’s cash as a critical task in working capital
management. In this regard, the efficiency of a business in managing cash will influence the
growth of business operations (Salas-Molina, Martin, Rodríguez-Aguilar, Serrà and Arcos, 2017)
and ensure the sufficiency of working capital to maximise profits (Tran, Abbott and Yap, 2017).
Attom (2013) also depicted that the model of cash management in micro and small-scaled
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enterprise as a combination of three elements; cash receipts, cash payment and cash balance as
shown in Figure 1.
A C
B Cash Balance
Cash Receipts
Cash Payments
Cash sales
Wages and salaries
Collection from Cash purchases
debtors
Payment to creditors
Interest income
Other expenses Surplus Deficit
Other income Invest Borrow
Source: Attom(2013)
Figure 1: Elements of Cash Management
A business needs to maintain good cash management system in order to accelerate the payment
of debt obligations, to increase business’s profitability, sustainability, and future planning
(Righetto, Morabito and Alem, 2016) and to ensure the business maintains low investment in
cash in an efficient and effective operation (Attom, 2013). For SMEs, their high dependency on
limited cash resources creates the importance of having a good cash management (Michalski,
Rutkowska-Podołowska and Sulich, 2018). This is because in business, cash are deemed as too
costly for the business to rectify and could lead to problems of liquidity (Attom, 2013). A good
cash management will also significantly influence the chances for financial assistance approval
by financial institutions.
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SMEs have difficulty to allocate revenue reserves to ensure the survival of their businesses. In
response, the government have laid out strategies to support SMEs to ensure their business
survival (Ahmad and Seet, 2009) through various mechanisms such as Ikhtiar Financing Scheme,
Rural Economy Funding Scheme and the PNS Franchise Scheme to provide alternative channels
for SMEs to apply for financial assistance (SME Corporation Berhad, 2016). It was found that
for the first quarter of the year 2016, financial assistance provided to SMEs by financial
institution has widened the debt exposure of their business (SME Corporation Berhad, 2016).
However, although SMEs have received financial supports through various channels, they are
concerned on their ability to repay such financing and thus lead to poor cash management.
In order to implement cash management practices and improve the performance for sustainability
purpose, training support is crucial as it could enhance the acquisition of knowledge, skills and
competencies of managers and employees (Mohamad et al., 2016). Training is needed to ensure
the employees understand the importance of good cash management and implication of cash
management towards business sustainability. On the other hand, although the government had
provided various programs to strengthen human capital capabilities, the sustainability of the
business is not assured (SME Corporation Berhad, 2016).
Besides, technological resources are useful for small businesses as these technologies may help
them to practice cash management. Technological resources are creative processes that assist
people to utilise tools, resources, and systems to solve problems in the effort to improve human
conditions (Toh, 2018). According to Aren and Sibindi (2014), possible technologies used in
business transactions are Point-Of-Sale (POS) as the system is complete with touch screens,
barcode scanners, pin pad machines for credit and debit card payments, cash registers, software
programs, Electronic Article Surveillance (EAS), and Radio-Frequency identification (RFID)
technology systems. In this light, Aren and Sibindi (2014) showed that many businesses that
implemented a manual cash management system, ranging from the use of manual invoice books,
not accepting debit and credit cards, to the basics of just receiving cash payments, writing cash
received in a notebook, and handing cash over to the store owner at the end of business day
instead of banking in the business account, face problems in financial management. This result is
consistent with the findings obtained by McChlery, Meechan, and Godfrey (2004), who
established the use of computerised accounting systems as a prominent catalyst in promoting
efficient financial management. However, the use of new technology needs high investment,
which makes SMEs are reluctant to adopt new technology.
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that there are the impact of cash management on profitability and sustainability of small retail
businesses.
Based on the RBV theory, a framework is proposed in this study as illustrated in Figure 2:
Method
This study focuses on 600 recipients in the services sector under SMEs fund for the year 2015
and 2016 from the main cities across three states in the Eastern Region of Malaysia, including
Kota Bharu (Kelantan), Kuala Terengganu (Terengganu) and Kuantan (Pahang). Using sample
selection method from Sekaran and Bougie (2016), from 600 population, 234 sets of
questionnaires were distributed to respondents. The random and convenience sampling methods
were used to choose the sample. The data was collected from the respondents on a continuous
basis from November 2017 to January 2018. Out of 234, only 150 questionnaires could be used
for further analysis.
Data were collected through a questionnaire which was developed based on researches
conducted by Mbuva (2014), Ajmal and Anderson (2014), Mungal and Garbharran (2014),
Gilbert et al. (2013), Muinde (2013) and National Small Business Association (2010). There are
four sections for this questionnaire. All indicators from each section derived from focus group
discussion with a government agency in Malaysia. The availability of resources measured using
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the basic resources need by SMEs, cash management measured using the element of cash
operation and financial sustainability measured using the financial performance that can be
verified by SMEs owner. Below are the list of variable:
Given that most of the items in the questionnaire are targeted to measure the respondents’
perceptions and attitudes, Likert-type scale is considered more appropriate and reliable to be
used (Alreck and Settle, 1995). For each variable, the respondents were asked to rate their
opinion using the five-Likert type with 1 = Strongly Disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neither Agree
or Disagree, 4= Agree, and 5 = Strongly Agree. Krosnick and Fabrigar (1997) argued that the
range of scale of 5 for likert-scale is established to be more reliable and enables the researcher to
make more subtle distinction among the attitudes of various individuals regarding a particular
object.
Analytical Methods
For this study, statistical analysis and hypotheses were tested using Structural Equation
Modelling (SEM) by performing Partial Least Squares (PLS) method. The SmartPLS software,
Version 2.0 was used to conduct the analysis (Ringle, Wende and Will, 2005). PLS is a well-
established technique for estimating path coefficients in structural models and despite criticism,
it has become increasingly popular in business management research specifically the last decade
because of its ability to model latent constructs under conditions of non-normality using small to
medium sample sizes (Hair, Hult, Ringle and Sarstedt, 2013). PLS algorithm procedures were
performed to determine the significance levels of the loadings, weights, and path coefficients
followed by Bootstrapping technique was applied to determine the significance levels of the
proposed hypothesis. Following the procedure suggested by Anderson and Gerbing (1988),
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reliability and validity of measurement model were estimated before testing the structural
relationships outlined in the structural model.
Findings
Measurement Model
As discussed above, this study examined the outer loadings, composite reliability, Average
Variance Extracted (AVE = convergent validity) and discriminant validity to evaluate
reflectively measurements model. First, the measurement model was tested for convergent
validity. This was assessed through factor loadings, Composite Reliability (CR) and Average
Variance Extracted (AVE) (Hair et al., 2006). Table 2 shows that with the exception of 4 items,
all the other item loadings exceeded the recommended value of 0.6 (Chin, 1998). Moreover, the
composite reliability values, which depict the degree to which the construct indicators indicate
the latent construct, exceeded the recommended value of 0.7 (Hair et al., 2006) while the average
variance extracted, which reflects the overall amount of variance in the indicators accounted for
by the latent construct, exceeded the recommended value of 0.5 (Hair et al., 2006).
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FS2 0.658
FS3 0.662
FS4 0.805
Technological Support TE1 0.877 0.799 0.916 0.94
TE2 0.933
TE3 0.882
TE4 0.883
The next step was to assess the discriminant validity, which refers to ‘the extent to which the
measures are not a reflection of some other variables’ and it is indicated by the low correlations
between the measure of interest and the measures of other constructs (Ramayah, Yeap and
Igatius, 2013; p. 142). Table 2 above shows that the square root of the AVE (diagonal values) of
each construct is larger than its corresponding correlation coefficients pointing towards adequate
discriminant validity in Table 3 (Fornell and Larcker, 1981). Thus, the measurement model
shows an adequate convergent validity and discriminant validity.
Structural Model
SmartPLS 2.0 was used to test the structural model and hypotheses (Ringle et al., 2005). A
bootstrapping procedure was performed to examine the statistical significance of the weights of
sub-constructs and the path coefficients (Chin, Peterson and Brown, 2008). Figure 3 shows the
results of the structural model analysis. The corrected R2 in Figure 3 refers to the explanatory
power of the predictor variable (s) on the respective construct. It can be seen that all the
independent variables including employees’ accounting skills and ability, financial management
trainings, financial support and technological support explain 38.0% of cash management
practices and all of them explain 38.1% of financial sustainability.
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The complete results of the structural model and hypotheses testing are presented in Table 4. The
results from structural model support seven out of nine hypotheses of the study.
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resources and monitor the entrepreneurs as these matters are required to effect continued growth
and success.
On the other hand, this study has several limitations. First, the scope of this study is limited to
three states in East Region of Malaysia, which are Kelantan, Terengganu and Pahang. Therefore,
the result of this study cannot be generalised to SMEs in all states in Malaysia. In this regard,
future researchers can extend the study by taking samples of all states in Malaysia. Second, the
method used in this study is survey questionnaire, whereas future researches can extend the
collection of data by conducting interviews to allow respondents to share their perception on this
issue. Lastly, there could be other factors that influence the financial sustainability of small
business which are not included in this study. Due to that, the future researchers can explore
other external factors, for example role of entrepreneurial cognition, objectives, ownership types
and business life-cycle stages in financing/investment decisions.
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