Financial Solutions for SMEs

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) don’t have access to the kinds of bulk financial solutions that large enterprises can use. Instead, small businesses need more focused tools that can sub in for what might be an essential in-house function in a large corporation. Otherwise, you spend too much money on functionality designed to streamline efficiency that you often don't need. Here are five ways to save money and carry out business as if you had many more employees than you do.

1. Staffing Instead of Human Resources

Hiring employees can be a huge time investment. Often, if you don’t give this task enough attention, your whole business will suffer. So, it may seem like a human resources person, or whole department is a top priority. Not necessarily so. You can save money without sacrificing employee quality by using outside staffing solutions. Try a solution you can access on your smartphone, like GoodHire, to get started.

2. Invoice Financing Instead of Financing and Collections

Invoice financing is a two-part tool. First, you may not need to pursue traditional loans if you use invoice financing, because you'll get money from the invoice as soon as you issue it, so that you can fulfill the work with the benefit of having cash on hand. You don’t need the same credit rating or company history to take advantage of invoice financing as you may if you were approaching a bank for a loan instead.

The second problem that invoice financing can solve is the hassle of having a collections team, or of asking your receptionist (or other staff) to track down your payments. The factoring company will do the work of tracking down the payment on your behalf. With nonrecourse factoring you have even more security if the factoring company is unable to receive payment.

3. Hootsuite Instead of a Social Media Team

Having a diverse social media strategy is smart, because some platforms get more and less popular with different demographics overtime. However, you likely find that it would be too much work for your marketing team, or for you, to post to any more channels than you already have. Inactivity can be more harmful to a brand than just not having the account at all. Use Hootsuite to post to multiple accounts all at once, and schedule your posts for the future, so that you don’t have to interrupt every day with your posting schedule.

4. Loyverse Instead of Paid Point-of-Sale

Loyverse is a free option for companies without a point-of-sale solution and those that don't have the resources to dedicate to a loyalty program. This POS and inventory management software will show you basic sales analytics, making it a very useful software option for SMEs.

5. Telzio Instead of a Phone Network

Sometimes, even when you want to stay lean, you’re tempted to invest in business infrastructure, like a phone network. If you absolutely need one, try using Telzio instead. It allows you to set up a system over the Internet, which allows your team to take calls anywhere. It’s more flexible and suitable for the realities of modern business.

Whether you'd like to learn more, or you're ready to take the jump and reap the advantages of financial solutions like invoice financing and non-recourse factoring, reach out to us at J D Factors. Our experienced team is here to help SME's like yours.

Tips for Spring Cleaning Your Business' Finances

In light of COVID-19, your business may be feeling the financial stress experienced by most Canadians. Are your business' finances robust enough to hold you over until the quarantine is over? Whatever state your finances are in, now is a good time to do some financial spring cleaning. Revisit your business goals, plans and expenses to make your business more robust for this and future challenges. 

Revisit Your Long-Term Goals

Now that your short-term business has changed so dramatically, you may need to change your long-term goals. If you don't have any written down, now is a great time to start keeping a written record of the things you want to accomplish, whether it's a sales goal, creating a new website, or launching a new product.

Unfortunately, because of COVID-19, many of the long-term goals you've had for the year may need to be pushed back. And, because of the current uncertainty about when things will return to normal, you may have to leave your long-term goals on the backburner.

However, you can still learn a lot about what your next steps should be by re-prioritizing your goals and identifying those that you can accomplish in the short-term. Maybe a new product launch isn't your next best step. Perhaps reaching an online audience or starting to ship your goods is now your top priority.

Better Business Management

Have you invested in new digital tools to help you manage your business? These solutions aren't just limited to finances. Cloud-based tools may be as helpful for communicating with clients as they are for invoicing or communicating with your employees.

These solutions do not have to be expensive, either. There are now many free or open-source versions of some popular business management tools. Although, depending on your current finances, now might be a great time to check out paid options too. You have the time to really get to know new software and discover if it will fit your needs moving forward.

Consider Cash Flow

Many businesses are having cash flow problems now as their sources of revenue pause or dry up. If you were already having cash flow problems before the crisis began, you may have had even less time to prepare your business to survive than you would have otherwise.

You can better manage your cash flow moving forward with factoring, a type of financing where you are paid up-front for the invoices you create, even though you have not yet been paid by your client. This arrangement gives you the capital to buy materials, tools, pay employees, and handle your other business expenses.

The team at J D Factors specializes in non-recourse factoring and remains open for business for new and existing clients. We know that the current situation has put a lot of financial stress on companies, which is why our team remains open for business and ready to help you.  Our advanced automated systems will allow you access to quick cash in under 24-hours. Simply send us your invoices and any backup documentation such as time sheets, delivery slips, etc. by email and we will fund you with a direct deposit into your bank account.

Our non-recourse factoring program will allow you to continue to work for and bill your customers with peace of mind knowing you will not have any bad debt. This is a great way to minimize your risk in times of uncertainty. Give us a call today to learn more about how we can help your business survive the financial uncertainty caused by COVID-19.

Factoring and Taxes - What SMEs Need to Know

For small or mid-size business owners, tax season can be nothing short of a headache. On top of ensuring that business continues as usual through invoicing, payroll and other current daily operating expenses, there is the added stress of making sure that all of the previous year’s budgets, expenses and revenues are aligned and accounted for, and that everything is properly deducted and filed on time. There is also the risk of penalties – more money lost – if there are delays, which can be an even greater problem for small business owners.

To help ease the strain, here are some key tax tips for 2020 that every SME should keep in mind.

4 Tax Tips for 2020

Proper Bookkeeping

If 2019 wasn’t the best year for organizing and staying on top of company documentation, 2020 is the time to start. While many SMEs can afford a bookkeeper, those who can’t and must keep track of everything on their own should be even more mindful about proper documentation. This includes having receipts and other records properly sorted in physical folders with digital copies where possible - a good practice to carry forward as more processes are being conducted online regardless. Additionally, in the event that something happens to those print documents, keeping a separate backup can be critical come tax time.

Consulting a Professional Accountant

For small business owners especially, the guidance of an accountant or CPA is useful in sorting through and organizing documentation, expenses, tax credits and even potential deductions that may have been missed. This also includes advice on what the CRA will be looking for in the case of an audit and ensuring that all of the common expenses, such as vehicle, entertainment and meal expenses, are accurately accounted for. In some situations, tax preparation and accounting fees can also be considered tax-deductible.

Requesting an Extension

If time is an issue, filing a request for a tax extension can be a helpful step to avoid missing deadlines which can be even more costly in the long run. In the event that a deadline passes and a business must pay up on penalties, accounts receivable factoring can also be a key solution.

Factoring for SMEs

With invoice factoring and accounts receivable factoring, SMEs can get the money they need to balance outstanding invoices and cover tax costs to the CRA without putting a strain on daily cash flow. At J D Factors, we pay your invoices upfront, minus a nominal discount, then handle the risk, time and energy involved in collecting payment. This service allows SMEs to continue business operations without the worry of unstable cash flow or missed payments from clients.  

Contact J D Factors to learn more about protecting your business during tax season and get more tips for invoice factoring and accounts receivable financing.

Bankruptcies are on the Rise: What Does it Mean for Your Credit?

In 2019, Canadians have seen an increased bankruptcy rate. More Canadians are facing insolvency than ever. Roughly 15 percent of income earned by Canadians goes towards debt payment. According to Loans Canada, the reasons for this high level of bankruptcy may include high cost of living, social pressure for spending, and missing payments. If you’re considering bankruptcy you may want to first know how it affects your credit, and what other options are available to you. 

How Bankruptcy Impacts Your Credit

Bankruptcy does significantly lower your credit score. As a result, you may be unable to get a car loan, mortgage, or business loan while the record of your bankruptcy impacts your credit rating.

How long will that be? A bankruptcy remains on your credit report for six years from the date of your discharge. It takes about nine months to get to the discharge phase, so the total is almost seven years. If this is your second bankruptcy it will remain on your credit report for 14 years.

This doesn’t mean you can’t get any credit products during this time. In fact, it is important to get a starter credit card and develop good habits with it. Doing so can help you rebuild your credit. Anyone who has declared bankruptcy should seek professional help about how best to rebuild their credit, so they can avoid a second bankruptcy.

Businesses can also declare bankruptcy. If you’re a sole proprietor this process is no different than filing for personal bankruptcy. If you own an incorporated business, it can go bankrupt without impacting your personal credit. However, you may need to sell the assets of the business in the insolvency process.

Pre-Bankruptcy Options for Businesses

As it has long-term effects on your credit and other costs, it’s best to avoid bankruptcy whenever possible. Depending on your businesses’ situation, one of these options may help you recover financially instead:

Debt counselling can help your business develop a plan to recover from your debt before you’re forced to declare bankruptcy. Professional guidance can show you how you need to change your specific financial habits to get your debt under control.

That professional may also suggest a debt consolidation loan. This kind of loan combines all your debt sources into one, even dropping the interest rate down on some of the debts. Paying only a single payment and collecting less interest will help you recover from the debt.

Sometimes your situation warrants a Business Proposal instead. This is an offer you develop with a licensed insolvency trustee that helps you recover financially, often focusing on consolidating your debt and lowering the interest rate.

If you’re a business owner, you have other tools that can help you get back on track. Invoice factoring is one option. It gives you a healthier cash flow, so that you can make debt payments more regularly. 

As an owner of an incorporated business you may be able to combine factoring with other pre-bankruptcy options. Call J D Factors today to find out of invoice factoring is an option for your business.

How to Reduce the Risk of Your Accounts Receivable

There’s always some risk to your accounts receivable. You’ve performed the work and sent your invoice, but will they pay you? Not always.  

Depending on the size of your contracts and how often your clients fail to pay, your business could face some serious liabilities. Some businesses even declare bankruptcy after taking on a string of bad clients.

There are ways to reduce the risk of your accounts receivable. Business owners may turn to accounts receivable insurance or non-recourse factoring to find compensation for those clients who can’t pay. Which option is better for you?

Accounts Receivable Insurance

For a premium, accounts receivable insurance offers you protection from damages you incur from unpaid invoices. If you have to hire a collection service your insurance policy may cover the cost. Or, if you have to take out a loan in order to make up the gap for an unpaid invoice, your policy may cover the interest on the loan. This insurance is also useful if a disaster or technological failure has caused you to lose track of your account receivable records causing you to be unable to collect.

Just like other insurance policies, your accounts receivable insurance will have a policy limit. If you have large invoices you may need to pay high premiums in order to get them covered. Further, your premium rates will go up if you need to use the insurance. There’s also the chance that the insurance company will find a reason to deny your claim.

Non-Recourse Factoring

Non-recourse factoring, on the other hand offers more benefits and less risks. How does factoring work? You send your invoices to the factoring company and they send you the cash, minus their fee. At J D Factors we send you the cash owed you within 24 hours. With us, you have your money without worrying about hiring a collections company or taking out a loan to cover your losses.

You’re paid, but what about your clients? The factoring company collects from your clients directly. With non-recourse factoring, if your client never pays because of a credit issue such a bankruptcy, the factoring company takes the loss for you. That’s much more convenient and easier to plan around than trying to make an insurance claim only after your client has refused to pay.

For this reason, non-recourse factoring helps businesses keep a healthy cash flow and a more flexible business model that is able to invest or expand when needed.

Benefits to Insurance Brokers

If you’re an insurance broker, why would you mention non-recourse factoring to your clients? Not all of the contacts you have will end up choosing accounts receivable insurance. However, you can still make money on these contacts for whom accounts receivable insurance isn’t a good fit. Simply refer them to J D Factors for non-recourse factoring. We’ll give you a referral fee. Plus, if you can offer your clients the solutions their business needs, you’ll earn their trust, they’ll stay with you for all their insurance needs, and they’ll refer you to their peers. Talk about a win-win-win!

Contact J D Factors today to learn how to reduce the risk of your account receivables with non-recourse factoring for yourself or a client.

A Good Problem to Have? Managing Hypergrowth

Finding that your business has surpassed your expectations, and is growing faster than you ever anticipated is as exciting as it is terrifying. Hypergrowth is something that all companies dream of, but few achieve, and when they do achieve it most CEOs quickly realize that huge growth can have some serious consequences. Managing your cash flow during your period of hypergrowth is fundamental to any start up, or rapidly expanding business.

Learn from the experience

Hypergrowth can be a make or break period for businesses, and for the individuals involved. In order to expand your business quickly, you need to have the cash available to support the growth, including hiring more staff and expanding office space and equipment to house and support your staff.

Aditya Agarwal joined Facebook when the company was still only 15 people strong, and stayed there until he became Director of Product Engineering just six years later. Agarwal’s own startup, Cove, was then snapped up by Dropbox and Agarwal went from 30 engineers to more than 200. No wonder Agarwal says that “most of what I’ve learned in my career has been during a period of hyper growth and change.” Managing your company through a period of hypergrowth can be incredibly stressful and difficult, but as long as you have the cash to support your growth, and commit yourself to learning from your successes and failures, the experience you gain will be invaluable.

Expect the unexpected

When Jiliene Helman, the CEO of Realty Mogul, raised $9 million of funding, the company went from 6 to 30 people in about three months. Helman knew that there would be some growing pains, but there was one issue that no one saw coming, “we didn’t anticipate how badly crippled our organization would be when the need for parking spots quintupled in just one week. Nobody could get into the office on time and our employees suffered numerous parking tickets.”

Don’t get so focussed on expanding that you miss the little things. Of course for Helman, the real issue wasn’t parking spaces, but integrating so many new people and new ideas into a company.

Find the right staff

From his time at Facebook and Dropbox, Agarwal says that during a period of hypergrowth you need people who are:

1)      Fast learners

2)      Comfortable with rapid change

3)      Able to improvise and handle ambiguity.

Hiring the right people to add to a growing business requires a budget that will allow you to hire from the top of the talent pool. According to Helman, “it’s not about just training an employee to do their job, but training the employee on how we expect our team to make decisions and the core values at the company.”

Be a CEO and a leader

Many companies that start small and then undergo a period of hypergrowth undergo a massive change of responsibilities for the CEO. In a small business a CEO might be expected to do everything, from sales, to coding, to marketing. A CEO’s job isn’t to work on the small details, in fact it is just the opposite. Focussing on the small details means that you aren’t leading your people or carving out a future path for your company – important jobs for a CEO.

Instead of doing every single task yourself you need to build a team, and internal processes that allow other people to do the work for you, to the standard that you would expect from yourself. This is a costly but critical venture for any company experiencing hypergrowth. According to Helman, “Once you’ve hired a team for all the roles you used to run yourself ragged trying to fill, you can focus on being a CEO.”

Agarwal advises that, to be a leader, you need to:

·       Scale outside of your own skillset

·       Accept that there will be setbacks and failures

·       Take opportunities to learn, don’t be afraid of new challenges

·       Don’t get emotional.

Enjoy it!

If your company is lucky enough to experience hypergrowth then remember, no matter how overwhelming it may seem at times, you are in a position that most companies can only dream of. Enjoy it and make the most of it!

At J D Factors we specialize in helping companies find the financial solutions needed to survive periods of hypergrowth. Contact me today for more information.

Are you paying enough attention to your cash flow?

Cash flow is the amount of money coming into a business minus the amount of money going out. It is a deceptively simple concept that is far too often overlooked by small to medium sized businesses.

Cash flow is the blood that circulates throughout your company, it delivers oxygen to the extremities and keeps the heart pumping. Money comes in from investors, sales, and other sources and flows out when buying inventory, paying staff, and taking care of other business expenses. Without a consistent cash inflow, the cash outflow inevitably drains the company over time.

Cash flow is integral to determining the net present value of a company. Calculating weekly cash flow can be used to predict future cash flow from which the overall value of the company can be extrapolated. Using this model, businesses can make long term strategic decisions, as well as short term corrections.

Cash flow determines value

When cash outflow is greater than cash inflow, then the value of the company decreases. When cash inflow is high relative to outflow, then the business is worth more. Increasing future cash flow is integral to building the value of any business long term, but there are also important short term applications including:

• Servicing creditors
• Paying shareholders
• Informing bonus structures
• Reinvesting into the business itself.

Perils of ignoring cash flow

Despite the uses and benefits of a net positive cash flow, the concept is not applied across the board. In the late 1990s, many tech companies eschewed the net positive cash flow model, relying instead on investors who were all too happy to jump on the tech bandwagon. When the bubble burst the companies went under and pulled their investors with them. Webvan, a food delivery company is endemic of the tech industry’s problematic cash-adverse philosophy. According to Bloomberg “in 2001, Webvan drove off a cliff into Chapter 11 only 18 months after its IPO, due to rapidly disappearing cash reserves.”

Optimal cash flow

A low or negative cash flow current ratio is bad, but so too can be a very high cash flow. Money flowing into a business in large quantities with minimal expenditure means that there may be a lack of investment in the company itself. Exactly how much of your cash flow you should reinvest in your business is up for debate. According to Entrepreneur, some experts suggest that small businesses reinvest as much as 50% of their positive cash flow.

Underinvestment is as dangerous as over expenditure because it means that the company is stagnating. Increasing cash inflow allows businesses to make crucial investments which grow their business overtime, increasing future cash inflow. 

For small to medium enterprises (SMEs), maintaining optimal cash flow is critical to success. According to financial technology experts Daily Fintech “A survey of 1000 British SMEs, conducted by invoice finance provider Hitachi Capital, found that improving cash flow was key to unlocking growth.” In fact, the survey showed that cash flow was so important to these SMEs that “each quarter it was included as a top three consideration for business owners, alongside reducing overheads and market expansion.”

When cash flow is overlooked

Cash flow is one of the most important, and undervalued aspects of a business. It determines current and future value, and dictates reinvestment back into the company. Striking the right cash flow ratio is vital to success now, and in the future.

Steps to take to optimize working cash flow:

• Asses your current cash flow by calculating expense versus cash inflow. You will have to make some judgement calls, but remember it is better to be more conservative and underestimate cash inflow, than to find yourself short of working capital later on due to a faulty model. Different businesses calculate their cash inflow in different ways. The Wall Street Journal reports that Procter & Gamble refer to cash flow as “free cash flows”, and PespiCo calculates “management operating cash flows”
• Focus on cash inflow and reducing long term debt during challenging times
• Reinvest your net positive cash flow into expanding your business or making it more competitive
• Create internal processes for striking the right balance between net positive cash inflow and reinvestment. Many businesses set aside a certain percentage of revenue to pursue future initiatives. This may mean prioritizing growth over profits, bonuses, or other non-core expenditures.

At JD Factors we specialize in helping businesses get a handle on their cash flow. Contact me today for help solving your cash flow issues and for financially viable options to reinvest in your business.