The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales has recently published its Business Confidence Index for the second quarter of 2019. And pretty grim reading it is.
Bad debt: a fact of business life
Even companies with the most rigorous credit control procedures run the risk of incurring a bad debt should a customer fail. For smaller companies, incurring a significant bad debt can result in the end of the business itself.
Investing? Or propping up?
According to research by peer-to-peer lending group, rebuildingsociety.com, the average SME business owner has invested £22,700 of their own personal money into their business in the last year. And the study shows that 37% of those planning to raise money outside traditional bank borrowing will use their personal credit cards (despite standard interest rates typically being around 18.9%, and often much higher).