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Like elite athletes, successful entrepreneurs are always up for challenges. It doesn't matter what economic situations they face, elite entrepreneurs are constantly finding ways to improve. Great managers achieve steady success regardless of occasional setbacks.

It's a relentless commitment to excellence that enables them to meet and exceed their goals. That and realizing that numbers are critical management tools.

While attention to customer service and marketing are important in tough economic conditions, it's financial actions that help entrepreneurs remain competitive.

Here are four actions to give you that edge.

Customer payments: Maintain a system that reveals aging of your accounts receivable. Ask your accountant to measure the average balance relative to sales. When you see this figure creeping up, your customers are waiting longer to pay.

Allowing customers to pay several days after a purchase is a privilege you offer, not a buyer's right. You have the right to expect prompt payment, and the regular customers with whom you've established valued relationships will understand.

Of course you can afford to be lenient with customers who keep their word and are honest about temporary cash shortages. But you may want to change transaction terms - even requiring payment at the time of sale - for those customers who consistently let you down when it comes to payment.

Vendor priority: Just as you expect prompt payment from customers, your vendors expect the same. But not all vendors are equal. Remitting payroll taxes, for example, is critical and should be a top priority. Paying your rent should also be a priority, more so even than paying your banker, who is often willing to resolve issues and avoid collateral repossessions.

Keep an accounting of amounts owed to each vendor. If the numbers creep upward relative to sales, it is essential to prioritize vendors. Be proactive. Contact vendors and ask for extra time to remit payments. Always pay the highest-priority bills first and describe your circumstances honestly to every vendor.

Inventory balance: Holding too much inventory relative to sales is a recipe for disaster, and a successful business sells its inventory promptly. The basic procedure of measuring your inventory turnover must be conducted often. Your accountant can show you the equation, which uses numbers readily available from your bookkeeping system.

Don't be afraid of discounting stale inventory. Too many businesses don't hold enough cash during a downturn in sales and unloading old items from inventory helps you to weather a slump. In fact, the cash you raise through liquidating your stale inventory allows you to accumulate new inventory at low prices.

Experiment: Top-quality business owners always have an eye to the future. They improve upon what they do well and discard mistakes. They experiment and measure the results.

For example, you can enhance sales with free installations or by offering extended warranties. Create customer loyalty clubs or invest in training your sales team. Most important, you could schedule regular meetings with your accountants to review company bookkeeping and evaluate overall your financial condition.

In today's world, it's impossible to get away from data. Bits of data are everywhere - in the grocery store and in historical crime data. They are also behind the gadgets we use each and every day.

In fact, there's so much data, it's hard to know what to do with it all.

But there is a silver lining on the horizon. There's a Big Payoff when you learn how to analyze the Big Data that's out there for your benefit.

So what exactly is Big Data? In short, the phrase refers to dynamic trends in technology that help the world make better decisions.

Think of the microscope - a tool that allowed the world to measure things like never before, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. Learning how to analyze and measure data is the equivalent of the profound effect and opportunities the microscope created.

Twitter hashtags, Facebook wall posts and Google queries are all types of data now being used to measure people's behaviors, feelings and desires in real time.

For example, chains like Wal-Mart analyze everything from sales to demographic and weather data in order to tailor the kinds of products they put on the shelves at individual stores.

Some police departments now use data such as historical arrest patterns and weather forecasts to gauge how many officers to send out in advance to so-called crime "hot spots."

And this is just the beginning. Our data universe is doubling every two years, and the not-so-distant reality is one in which decisions in business, economics and a variety of other fields will be based on the analysis of data rather than on experience and intuition, says Brynjolfsson.

Big Data is a large task, but the gains appear to be just that ... big.

All businesses need an online storefront that shifts visitors into customers with a decisive call to action. A call to action shakes your site visitor from a passive web surfer to an active participant interested in your business.

And with online shopping positioned as one of 2011's market success stories, despite the tough economy, it's clear that competitive businesses need a solid online strategy that includes a call to action.

Engage customers proactively

A call to action isn't just about selling online. It's about understanding that most customers research their purchases on shops' websites before they buy, either online or offline. Small businesses can take advantage of this by engaging prospective customers proactively.

Instead of just having an informative website, have your site work for you 24/7 by baiting customers with irresistible hooks.

People are attracted to free items (even if they don't want what's offered). Tap into this desire by offering visitors a free trial membership or a free newsletter subscription.

You can also offer free 15-minute consultations and let visitors book you then and there with online tools such as SuperSaas, Clickbook or BookingPad. Even if something is already a gratis service, adding a sidebar feature with the word "free" draws in visitors and gets you one critical step closer to a sale.

The same principle also holds true for coupons and special deals. The rule is: give them something and ensure that they recognize its value. You also risk losing a sale if your website has poor navigation. So use an easy-access FAQ page and a live chat feature such as that offered by top-rated Volusion.

No matter what route you take, offering multiple calls to action does work to secure offline sales.

Few business problems are more costly, and more unnerving, than losing information. Recovering just a few hours of data entry can take several days and hundreds of dollars. The solution is proper storage of digital information.

There can be intentional and unintentional reasons for losing data. Take, for example, deleting a file by accident. Or not saving it to start with. Fortunately, automatic save features are now built into most applications and self-service local backups represent an easy solution to recovering deleted files without requiring an IT wizard.

Cloud-based backups are an inexpensive option to prevent against data loss from natural disasters. In addition, this offsite backup offers protection against data theft and infection of files by outside viruses.

A basic offline backup is another solution, which retains at least one copy of data that intruders are unable to access or modify.

Hardware failures are inevitable. Downtime crashes are reduced or even eliminated by servers equipped with RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks). Using a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) reduces data corruption from power failures and overloads.

Large businesses have backup data centers and smaller companies can rely upon external hard drives. But, ultimately, there is only one sensible strategy for storing and protecting data and eliminating concerns over data loss. That is redundancy. Simply synchronizing data is not the same as creating redundant copies. The best solution is having multiple backups in different locations.