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How to Take Advantage of Commercial Finance Factoring Services in Canada

Guest post by: Stan Prokop

Article Overview: Factoring Benefits and How to Assess factor costs

How to Take Advantage of Commercial Finance Factoring Services in Canada

Commercial finance factoring Services may be the solution you are looking for business financing and working capital for your firm. You may or may not be aware that this type of cash flow financing is used by Canadian firms from start up to major corporations.

So what are the benefits of such a business financing and how is your firm able to take advantage of these. The bottom line in business usually always come back to cash flow, and a commercial finance factoring service or facility ( we like to call them working capital facilities ) gives you a form of predictable cash flow . Essentially your working capital grows lock step in pace with your sales growth, and handles all those up and down fluctuations in between.

When we discuss this financing with clients we often use a term ' you pay only for what you use ‘. That is because your firm essentially controls the cash flow spigot, if we can call it that. You have the ability to finance one invoice, a number of invoices, or all your receivables. It's your call!

Invariably the discussion around factoring, also known as ' invoice discounting ‘turns to cost of this service. First of all you have to know how the financing works, at which point you can then assess the costs and the advantages.

Let's look at a quick actual example to ensure we understand the process and cost. Let’s say one of your invoices has just been issued and it’s for $ 10,000.00 - we'll use a clear example and round number in our demonstration. So what happens next? Your firm is advanced, immediately, i.e. almost same day, approx 90% of that invoice amount. So you receive $ 9000.00 at the same time your customer receives their invoice! Your factor discount, i.e. ' the fee' might typical be 2% on this transaction. So if your customer pays the invoice in 30 days (*we’ll be back o you on that one!) your firm receives the balance owing to you, i.e. the holdback, less a 200.00$ fee. ** We realize that not all customers pay in 30 days!

So what just happened here? You made a sale, you got cash immediately for 90%, and you got the balance of the cash (in our case $800.00) when your customer paid. Your cost was 200.00$.

Astute business owners and financial managers can use that immediate cash wisely and productively. You could pay a supplier invoice that you just received, and take a 2% discount for prompt payment. You have just strengthened your relationship with a supplier, and saved 2% - and wait a minute, didn’t we have a 2% factor fee. If you net those two out your financing cost has been effectively reduced to almost zero.

Are all fees in Canada the same, and do all facilities have the same sort of business model and paper flow? The answer is no, they don’t. Your final factor fee, or discount fee depends on your client profiles, how much of a facility you need, the invoice size, and, the most important - how well your clients pay. Remember you can now finance those clients that pay in 60-90 days and have tied up your working capital, but ensure they are profitable clients because at 2% per month carrying cost that erodes your profit margins.

In business it’s all about turnover and your ability to turnover your inventory and, in our case, receivables ultimately determine your financing costs to carry your A/R investment.

Think of commercial finance factoring services as your own ATM machine for cash flow. It becomes a solid potential alternative to term loans with fixed interest, or bank financing that has the requisite requirements that come with a bank deal - solid financials, profitability, guarantees of owners, external collateral, etc.

For those business owners and financial managers that want to get a bit more analytical about the numbers here is another way to look at it - let’s use our same example: If you factored 10,000 once a month all year would have had the use of 120,000.00 in total capital. So your total finance costs on that would be 2400$.

If you borrowed 120,000$ in working capital from your bank at a rate of 6% per annum on a typical 3 year term you would pay over 10,000$ in interest for the same capital . The factoring financing using that logic was cheaper than the bank by at least 8000.00$.

So whats our bottom line? It’s simply that our basic arithmetic has shown us that if we take advantage of commercial finance factoring services we are in control of our own cash flow destiny as well as having the ability to increase sales and offset financing costs with careful use of cash flow and working capital from this unique type of business financing. Speak to a trusted, credible, and experienced business financing advisor in this area to maximize the advantage!

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Article Tags: commercial finance, factor costs, factoring services



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