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The transformed business finance landscape

I would like to use this time to try to take stock of what has happened over the last three months in terms of the Coronavirus pandemic and the support available for U.K businesses.

Even though it has only really been a few months, it has completely transformed the way some businesses do business.

And it has certainly transformed the financial landscape for all businesses and will probably continue to do so for the next maybe six, twelve, maybe even eighteen months.

Is this the landscape that you feel your business is in?

I think the prediction, really, from many bodies is that we will not actually get back to being where we were at in the next three years.

So it’s going to be difficult trading conditions and some of these problems that we have been encountering, you just could never have envisaged happening in a month of Sundays.

So, if you are experiencing difficulty with your finances, then please do not panic.

Do not bury your head in the sand.

Get some expert advice.

And if you get some expert advice, you have got a chance of being able to plan your way out of the Coronavirus pandemic and trade back to some level of normality rather than getting to the point where maybe you run out of cash and everything falls about around you.

That would be a tragedy for any business, but particularly as a result of, really, something you had no control over.

Contact us so we can put your business back into a thriving landscape.

So, if there is any way that we can help you at all, please DO get in touch.

That is what we are here for.

We want to save as many businesses as we possibly can, because only by businesses surviving will the economy start to thrive again.

Call us today on 01383 624 425 or submit an enquiry and we will contact you.

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Are you starting to panic about business cashflow or invoice funding?

I have been wondering whether there are people out there who have businesses who are starting to panic a little bit about their financial situation.

Now, this could be a growing feeling of concern that your cash flow is going to stall, or maybe you have noticed that the cash is not moving around your business as it did before the Coronavirus pandemic. You might have the growing realisation that you are going to run out of cash before you actually start to get money coming back in through the door.

Raising Invoices

Or it could be that you are raising invoices, but you are not getting paid as quickly as you would like to get paid.

So, you are wondering how you are going to pay your own bills, or it just could be that you don’t have any cash reserves?

As a result of not having any cash reserves, you have no confidence in terms of being able to meet your commitments going forward.

If this is the case, then we may have a solution for you, and it is a solution that I have used in the past in previous businesses to ensure that the cash keeps flowing, and that cash flow solution can be a life saver.

 

And if it is a life saver and we can help to save more businesses from going out of business, then that is why I am here.

So, if you do have a requirement to even just talk to somebody about it, because the worst thing you can do really is to bury your head in the sand and think that everything’s going to be fine, and it will go away.

It probably will not go away, and it will need to be addressed.

Review your businesses financial plan

Now, whether it is addressed with reviewing your financial plan and your costs or whether it is by putting a solution in place, something needs to happen.

Contact us today so that we can help you set up a plan and work out a solution to keep the cash flowing through your business.

 

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How has your business health been?

I was just wondering how your health had been throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.

I notice a lot of people in my local area have taken up jogging, and cycling, and myself included, certainly, have taken up walking to a greater degree with steps going through the roof over the last three months.

So, everybody is in a little bit of a better position with regards to their health and whether that has reflected in their mental health, is another matter.

But the area that really concerns me is the financial health of people’s businesses.

So, if you have a business and you are a little bit worried about how you’re going to trade through this period, the questions really to ask yourself are do you have a plan?

Have you got a plan to get through from where you are now to where you want to be?

Have you got cash reserves?

If you find that the invoices that you do start to raise start to take longer to get paid as a result of the knock-on effect from this pandemic, because everybody really has been affected, are you going to be able to meet the commitments that you have in terms of your bills?

And, do you have a budget and a cash flow?

And do the budget and the cash flow match or is there a shortfall there?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, then I would urge you to get in touch with us on the basis that we can probably come up with a solution for you.

Call us today on 01383 624 425 or submit an enquiry and we will contact you.

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Commercial funding for U.K businesses

Today I’m going to talk a little bit about the history of the lockdown.

As an expert U.K business finance broker, we’ve been in lockdown for 110 days now.

110 days ago, we had some issues in terms of how we were going to fund UK business going forward. The government has variously put forward schemes, so from the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme, or CBILS as you will have heard it, and then latterly the Bounceback Loan scheme for the 100 percent guarantee loan.

But the number of lenders that have come on stream in the last hundred-odd days is quite
remarkable, really. At the beginning of the lockdown, we had 42 lenders who were operating, previously, the Enterprise Finance Guarantee Scheme, and they were the route
that the government took to get the money that they guaranteed out to market.

Banks became inundated, they ended up with lots of backlogs and they were not taking on new cases from non-customers, so it became a little bit difficult to get some facilities through.

Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme.

However, we now have over 100 lenders in the UK offering the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme. So the choice of lenders is much improved.

Now in Scotland, it is even better as a proportion because before lockdown there were 22 lenders on the business bank website, there are now 72 lenders.

So, there is an additional 50. So that is giving you access to cash through the CIBILS scheme. Obviously, the Bounceback Loan Scheme has been put forward latterly, so that was the fourth of May. There are 20 lenders who are offering that scheme.

So, it is little bit more restricted in terms of who you can go to for that product. But if you are looking for anything between £2,000 and £50,000, still the advice is to talk to your existing bank because the likelihood is that your high street bank will be offering the Bounceback Loan Scheme, and it is probably the quickest and easiest way to accessing cash.

However, if you have a requirement for more structured cash and looking forward a little bit more, in terms of planning, through the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme, there are a number of different categories of lender.

Invoice finance lenders and asset finance lenders

So, you have the Term-Loan lenders, you have Invoice Finance lenders, you have Asset lenders and you also have Revolving Credit lenders, or, as you and I would probably know it, the traditional overdraft. So, in terms of the Term-Loan lenders, there are 91, now, who will offer that service, in terms of Invoice Finance or specialist Invoice Finance, a lot of the high street banks will also offer it, but they are not on the British Business Bank website as
offering this as a specialist finance, but for Invoice Finance there are 18 specialist lenders. On the Asset Finance there are 21 specialist lenders.

Again, there may be some high street banks that would do that, but they are not listed. So, these are just specialists in that field. Revolving credit, you are looking at 20 lenders who are offering Revolving Credit facilities, so overdrafts or just kind of Term-Loans effectively, so a cash flow advance I think you might call that.

So it’s a twelve month facility and it will be reviewed at the end of those twelve months, if you want to renew, then you may be able to do that. But it is another way of accessing cash reasonably quickly.

In terms of the availability of getting cash through to any of these banks, really, because of the increase in the number of lenders, it has increased the likelihood that one or more lenders will be interested in your case.

So the early days of CBILS, where people were a little bit disillusioned with it as a result of the lack of access, and that access has been improved considerably. And it is not really being talked about very much in the press.

So I thought I’d better let you know that these schemes are still running and they’re still very much available for you to assist you through this difficult trading period that we’re going to encounter over the next probably 12 to 18 months, I would suggest.

So, hopefully that has been of help to you and that you can access the cash that you require through those schemes.

Finance broker support

I can help you with the CBILS scheme, Bounceback Loan, though I can’t really help with, in terms of the idea that we have to put you in touch with your existing bank.

But if you have no joy with that, then obviously the third option is to come to a Finance Broker who has access to probably a wider range of lenders who may not be offering that scheme, but who also may be interested in supporting your business.

So if that’s of use, I’m pleased, because we want to make sure that as many businesses as possible survive as we come out the other end of lockdown.

Call us today on 01383 624 425 or submit an enquiry and we will contact you.

 

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What’s the difference between an Overdraft and an Invoice Finance Facility?

I have been getting asked recently ‘What is the difference between an Invoice Finance Facility and an Overdraft?’

Well, here is the answer. An Overdraft is the most commonly used form of short-term finance, with 16% of SMEs in the UK having one. An overdraft has an arrangement fee to put in into place, you pay interest when you’re using it (no interest when you’re not), and it’s a short-term facility – generally 12 months and renewed at the end of the year.

So if you’re constantly at the limit of your overdraft facility, then there is always the danger that it could be construed as a long-term debt rather than a short-term facility and the bank could ask you to repay that, potentially by putting it into a term loan. At
which point, the benefit of having the overdraft, in terms of no capped repayment requirement and no monthly cost, is superseded because the loan now has a monthly repayment.

The alternative to that, as is often put forward and is a very different kind of facility, is the Invoice Finance Facility.

The Invoice Finance Facility provides you with money upfront on your invoices, before you get paid by your customer.

There is a monthly management fee which needs to be paid on the facility, and you pay interest as and when you are required to borrow money against the invoice. So, if you’re not borrowing against an invoice, then you’re not paying any interest.

I guess the best way to look at it is to compare two companies. So, if we’ve got two companies that are look to grow – company 1 has an overdraft and company 2 has an Invoice Finance Facility.

Now, company 1, when it grows, will grow using its overdraft facility, which is a set amount of money, and it will get to the overdraft limit and find that it starts to run out of cash as it tries to grow through that glass ceiling. So, it will need to go back to the bank and renegotiate the overdraft facility or potentially take out a loan in order to get to the next level of growth.

And then it may use up that finite amount of money as it continues to grow, and once again, it will have to do the same thing again and go back to the bank and try to renegotiate a new deal.

Whereas company 2, they have an Invoice Finance Facility. As they start to grow, they raise more invoices. The invoices then have money provided against them by the lender providing the Invoice Finance Facility which allows them to continue to grow, because the facility grows with them. It’s not the case of needing to renegotiate the facility every time the company grows, or needs more cash.

So an Invoice Finance Facility is a much more powerful way of actually growing your business without having to constantly worrying about reaching a predetermined limit set by the bank.

All that needs to happen is the business keeps growing, keeps selling, and keeps making a profit and the facility will grow with it. It’s a very powerful way of using the cash within a business in order to grow.

I’ve talked a lot about these facilities being very good for the survival of a business, which they absolutely are, but they are also very good for growth. I also think that they are very misunderstood in the market. The reason that I say that is that less than 1% of all UK businesses have an Invoice Finance Facility in place.

If you would like to get in front of other businesses by using an Invoice Finance Facility, if you have any questions, or would like the Financial Health of your business assessed, get in touch today and we can open a conversation.