Banks for You!

Managing the cash flow of consulting company can be very complicated.On one hand you have your consultant and employees who need to be paid every week or every other week. On the other hand, you have customers who usually pay their invoices on net 30 to net 60 day terms. Obviously, it is the responsibility of the consulting company to cover all expenses while waiting for the customers to pay. And unless the consulting company has to cash reserve or has access to a line of credit, this situation can lead to working capital problems.

One way to solve this problem is to ask customers to pay sooner. However, this requires customer cooperation. And ultimately, this strategy places your cash flow at the mercy of your customers. For many, a better alternative is to finance their invoices using invoice factoring.

Invoice factoring solves this problem by shortening the time period between invoicing the client and collecting the revenues for the invoice. Your customers dont need to pay sooner though .Rather,a factoring company advances funds against your accounts receivables and holds your invoices as collateral.

Read Full Post…

As a longtime cheapskate, and a new cheapskate mom, I have often been bemused by the amount of money people spend to prove to their spouses and children just how much they love them.

No time is this more true than on February 14 of each year, when love advertising goes into overdrive to convince consumers that true love is measured by wallet thickness.

For a family on a budget, the prospect of childrens parties at school, gifts or mementos from parents to kids, and the all-important Valentines gift between spouses can make you wish that the calendar could just skip from January to March.

Fortunately, making this year the most memorable Valentines Day yet for your family can cost next to nothing. Here are some cheap Valentines Day ideas that will leave your wallet untouched and your family delighted:

The yearly Valentine exchange in the primary school classroom is an important part of American childhood. In many classrooms, students are asked to give a Valentine to everyone in class, which means your child is on the hook for anywhere from 20 to 30 cards.

1.

Read Full Post…

One of my favorite blogs is kottke.org – a daily posting of fun facts, videos, photos and essays from around the web. Kottke recently posted a chart from a website called XKCD called “A chart of almost all the money” showing a huge visual representation of big picture things about money like how much a billion dollars can buy, total government spending, who are the wealthiest people in the world, etc.

This chart goes into amazing detail and it has a lot to teach us about the larger world of money. Here are some of the fun facts I found from “The Money Chart.”

Movies are big business, but they used to be even bigger. Although the modern film industry is still going strong, some of the most successful movies of all time were released during the 1930s. Adjusted for inflation, the top-grossing box office blockbusters of all time are Gone With the Wind (1939) ($3.16 billion), Snow White (1937) ($2.84 billion) and Star Wars (1977) ($1.68 billion). During the 1930s, 80 million Americans bought movie tickets each year.

America is governed by millionaires. The average net worth of a U.S. Senator is $13.4 million, and the average net worth of a U.S. Congressi

Read Full Post…

You are geared up to purchase a home, but then there are the added ownership expenses such as for appliance, renovations, furnishings and landscaping that you may not have foreseen. You may also have other plans for your money, like a new car or a vacation perhaps, or have countless of other loans that you would like to consolidate.

Mortgage costs are frequently the most inexpensive form of money owing. So if you are eligible for additional mortgage room, it may be tempting to roll whatever or each and every one of these extra expenses into your mortgage. The benefit of this line of attack is that you can obtain all you want, at what might appear like a controllable payment plan per month and low interest rate. The downside to this is the long-term effects of putting off complete payment for a lot of years.

You are in fact not doing away with debt but just transferring it. Even if the monthly payment may be manageable, you will be shelling out for it so much longer, and paying out larger sums in interest.

If you have credit card debt or perhaps a personal loan, you are actually capable of consolidating all your debts into your mortgage through a remortgage.

Read Full Post…

In a conventional invoice factoring transaction, the factoring company buys your invoices for an upfront payment. Now, when someone buys a tangible good (such as a home, a car or groceries) one can look at the goods before purchase to determine whether they are good or not the goods are tangible. On the other hand, you have invoices which are intangible. They are financial obligations basically printed on a piece of paper or stored in a computer file. You can’t examine these obligations just by looking at the invoice.

This leaves factoring companies with a problem because just like any buyer, they want to make sure they are buying quality invoices (or “product”). The only way they can do this is through the invoice verification process. When verifying an invoice, most invoice factoring companies are concerned about three things:

1. Is the invoice amount correct
2. Where they goods/services delivered on time?
3. Are the goods/services acceptable?

Most factoring companies verify invoices by sending an email to the accounts payable representative of the customer. Email is i

Read Full Post…