Firms can raise money for their business by selling their accounts receivables to someone else that will collect them on their behalf. What the other person will charge is a discount for taking up the responsibility of collection. This process is called factoring. Factoring can nowadays be used by any kind of business to raise money not like a while back when it used to be used only by businesses, which were not financially stable. So a business can get money through accounts receivable factoring.
In a company balance sheet, accounts receivables are also classified as finance assets and for that reason they can be used to get money for various uses within the business. All one needs to do is to get the other two parties to the transactions, the parties to a factoring process are the factor, the debtors and the seller. What the seller needs to do is to transfer its debts to the factor that will give him cash and do the collection himself.
In this process a firm does not consider the credit of a company, so they don’t need to have financial security to qualify, only the accounts receivables. This makes factoring a good source of investment, especially for small firms that may have difficulty securing loans from banks.
When businesses need money within a very short time, this process of factoring is preferable as there are no long procedures to follow in order to get the money, it can also be a long term process of raising the money as long as one is still in business and still has receivables.
There are also companies, who fail banks criteria of getting money through loans either because they are still small, or they do not have enough security to give to the bank or their capital base is not big enough. These companies can use factoring to raise money to improve their capital base or to cover all other financial obligation to enable them qualify for the bank loan for further business expansion.
Even if accounts receivables are finance assets to a business, they can default on their obligations and thus become a burden to a company, it will also interfere with a companyfinancial obligation position. With factoring all these risks are transferred to a factor and in the process improve a company’s cash flow position. The factor through experience is in a better position to collect money from the debtors.
Factoring does not tie a company down, as there are no long-term contracts done, there are no long term, resources involved. The business gets its money and is free to concentrate on its other obligations without worrying of the implication resulting from the source of money unlike a bank loan.