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Stories Tagged ‘concentration limit’

We have recently assisted a company in Manchester arrange a factoring facility.

Our client is a security company with a single debtor. While paying wages weekly they were only getting paid monthly at best by their customer who was a larger security company based in Birmingham.

We used a Manchester factoring company because the requirement was urgent so they could react quickly. We knew which local lenders could assist a security company with a single debtor.

The solution was implemented quickly to the satisfaction of our client.

 

If you take out an invoice finance facility and the prepayment is 80% you may well think that you will receive 80% of the total ledger. In theory that should be the case if the facility is set up properly. The key is to understand what your eligible debt is. Let’s look at areas that could reduce your eligible debt:

Concentration Limits – I have already touched on this in a previous post about concentration limits so will not go into too much detail. However, any debt that falls outside the concentration limit will not be eligible for funding and as such can reduce the eligible debt dramatically.

Recourse Period – If you have a recourse period of 90 days any debt that is over 90 days old will not be eligible for funding. If you have a £100,000 ledger but £20,000 is over 90 days old then the eligible ledger is only £80,000. This is what the prepayment level will be applied to.

Debtor limits – If you have 10 debtors of £10,000 you will have a ledger of £100,000. If you had an individual limit of £5,000 for each of those debtors the total eligible debt would only be £50,000 and with an 80% prepayment applied this would generate funding of £40,000. By trading over agreed credit limits you will in effect reduce the actual prepayment level.

It is imperative you set up a factoring facility that can accommodate the unique features of your own ledger. Ensure that the debtor limits and concentration limits are what your require. Shop around! Also ensure that you understand the recourse period and the effects it has on your funding and costs. Work hard to ensure debts are collected within the recourse period.

A concentration limit indicates how much debt an invoice finance funder will allow with a single debtor. By way of an example if your concentration limit is 30% and your total ledger is £100,000 then the lender will only consider £30,000 of funding with any single debtor. Supposing you had £50,000 of debt with your largest debtor then only £30,000 would be considered as eligible debt. This would reduce the total eligible debt to £80,000 so if your prepayment was 85% the funding generated would be £68,000.

It is important to understand the impact of a concentration limit on your funding. In the example above although you as a business have an 85% prepayment level the impact of the concentration limit has reduced the actual prepayment level to just 68%.

Concentration limits will not be an issue for many businesses who have a good spread of customers. However, if you feel that one customer could account for 20% of the money owed to you at any one time it is important to consider the concentration limit. Some lenders impose a rigid 20% concentration limit while others will offer a concentration limit as high as 100% meaning they will finance a single debtor. Be honest with yourself and try to envisage what may happen in the future.