The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) revised down its forecast for the UK economy in 2009.

It warns that the UK is still in a sharp recession. Output is set to contract by 4.3% in 2009, worse than the OECD’s previous forecast of a 3.7% fall. It predicts zero growth in the UK economy in 2010 and says the UK budget deficit will hit 14% of GDP next year. Its UK forecasts are worse than those the Treasury made during the Budget.

Others, like the National Institute for Social and Economic Research, have suggested that the recession is bottoming out in the UK. But on average forecasts are projecting the UK economy to contract by 3.7% in 2009, close to the chancellor's forecast of -3.5%.

Given that background we polled some FW members about their major concerns are going through 2009-10. Unsurprisingly, the lack of visibility and inability to forecast accurately remains major concerns for most.

Being unable to crystal gaze has serious implications in terms of planning working capital management and the criticality of cashflow. Availability of finance is also a worry. More specifically, where’s the money coming from when the banks aren’t playing ball? And of course, people issues are front-of mind with redundancies highly likely.

The onus remains firmly on cost cutting and efficiency savings and these are the issues we look at this week. Over the next few months, we’ll revisit these in more detail and explore tools and techniques like invoice factoring [1] to help the Finance team achieve the shared objective of doing more with less.