Offers for grants worth over $3.5 million will support 7 businesses to help launch their innovative products, processes and services into domestic and international markets.

The funding has been provided from the Accelerating Commercialisation element of the Entrepreneurs’ Programme.

What projects are being funded?

The latest funding offers will assist:

• Aldridge ITS in Sydney to finalise development and testing of its low-cost solar powered wireless level crossing system for the rail infrastructure market.
• Checkedin Care in Sydney to conduct commercial trials of its product Care Cohort, an app developed to enable elderly and disabled Home Care clients to stay in their homes longer.
• Concept Safety System in Logan City to integrate its Spatial Plan Service with state and regional emergency services agencies to help organisations prepare for and assist in emergencies.
• Fivecast in Adelaide to develop and commercialise a new product, Fivecast AI to address a large, international market for very high-volume automated risk analysis.
• Lucky Health in Sydney to conduct commercial trials to determine the effectiveness of its Perx medication adherence solution to address the problem of medication adherence for chronic disease patients.
• Real Time Data in Tooperang to accelerate worldwide commercialisation of Deckhand, its world leading, commercial fishing e-reporting and analytics software.
• Technobake in Moreton Bay to commercialise the DoughRunner, its commercial pocket-bread baking machine for the high-volume food retail sector.

What are the grants for?

The grants help businesses turn good ideas into marketable products through activities such as trials, upscaling and connecting with new markets.

Commercialisation Advisers from the Program work with the businesses through the different stages of their business building process to guide and provide advice.

So far 335 Australian businesses have benefitted from commercialisation funding through the Entrepreneurs’ Programme.

What to do:

• Find out more about the Accelerating Commercialisation grants.
• Check out past funding offers and their projects.
• Learn more about what else is offered for businesses through the Entrepreneurs’ Programme.
• Subscribe to the Accelerate eUpdate to stay up-to-date with Accelerating Commercialisation companies, news and information.

Why receivables is so hard to solve

There’s literally hundreds of blog posts giving you the 7-10 steps to reduce debtors and improve cashflow. Yet the debtors problem still exists to some extent in the majority of small and medium size enterprises (SMEs) globally.

In New Zealand alone, SMEs are the biggest lenders and poorest at managing it, with over $1 billion owing their businesses collectively.

When it goes wrong:

• You’re sending too many email reminders (causing needless friction)
• You’re posting too many statements
• You’re making too many phone calls
• You’re lending too much cash to your customers
• You’re writing off too much bad debt
• You or your team is burning too much time chasing late payers
• Your customers feel unloved, harassed or threatened

Good advice and support is hard to find.

• The cashflow cycle is an integral part of business and impacts every part from sales through to delivery, account management and accounts/admin. Therefore the issues are hard to diagnose.
• It’s too important to ignore – poor management of cashflow can cripple a business.
• General advice does not suit all your customers.
• Bookkeepers and accounts are not equipped to help.
• Good, tailored tools are hard to find. What do you use – emails? spreadsheets?

Where to start?

The solution is not a ‘one size fits all’. Sending out loads of email reminders won’t work for everyone – and will be causing needless friction. However, when used with purpose and written in the right tone, asking the right questions, they are a good starting point to ‘open the can’.

Personalised, automated email reminders can:

1. Gently remind those who ‘Oops I forgot’
2. Reiterate your terms and consequences
3. Give unhappy customers a chance to respond, which starts the conversation
4. Save you money on manual follow up, calls and posted statements

Check out Debtor Daddy’s Remind web app – it offers automated reminders with a personal touch and proven template options ready to go.

The question is, based on your situation, how should email reminders be deployed to save you time, collect cash or surface questions and disputes.

Introducing divide and conquer – a strategy for eliminating debtors forever, long term

Your business is supported by a variety of different groups of customers, who are going to react differently to your followup approach for late payment.

By developing a well researched, proactive, segmented and proven strategy, it is possible to run a business with happy customers and without debtors or late payers. Ultimately, freeing your or your team’s time to get back to the doing the business you love.

By implementing a this proactive approach, it considers all your different customer groups and all aspects of business from quoting, payment terms, onboarding customers, work delivery, invoicing, followup and lastly, ease of payment.

Getting help

There are multiple, moving parts to receivables management. Credit control is not straightforward. There are experts out there who are able to help you start to get your process right, enabling continual monitoring and improvements as your business grows and changes.

Debtor Daddy are an outsourced receivables department.

Too often businesses leave collecting debts at the bottom of the pile. Why? Often there is anxiety and worry around the process, or lack of trust in collection agencies. Sometimes lack of time and understanding of the process.

But a business’ debt collection process should be an easy, no brainer business-as-usual process. Just like your other well established business practices.

At Debtor Daddy, we’re breaking down these barriers, so debt collection is efficient, unemotional and more likely to see results.

WHY: Let’s start with why you should collect your debts…

Number one: CASH FLOW. In business, we (should) all know how important cash flow is. Without it, we simply can’t sustain being in business. A good payment follow up and debt collection process will ensure you have the cash to be able run your business.

Be part of the answer: Odds are, if you’re having a hard time getting payment from a debtor, others are having (or will have) trouble too. It’s your responsibility to the business community to help rid bad payers.

WHEN: Don’t leave it too late

The sooner you follow up, the higher your success rate will be. Everyday that your debtor doesn’t pay an overdue invoice, the more unlikely you are to get paid at all. As time goes on, your debtor’s mindset changes around what they owe you, and if enough time passes, they’ll often eventually feel that they don’t owe you anything at all.

And keep in mind – if you are giving your customers 30 day terms to pay, then by the time you reach the 90 day mark, you’ve been out of pocket for FOUR MONTHS! And even more shockingly, most businesses are leaving kicking in the debt collection process until 180 day.

Remember to follow up with overdue invoice reminders and phone calls regularly. And set yourself a rule in your business that a debt collection process kicks in at between 60 to 90 days overdue.

Interested in how Debtor Daddy can help with your business with debt collection? Chat to one of our Receivables Specialists about our Collect service today.

What is time?

Clichés. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. (See what just happened there—it’s that bad).

The most widespread, just-waiting-to-pop-out-at-you, cliché is a very short one, measuring just three words—time is money.

Usually, you hear this quoted by someone who is still waiting for the moving company to arrive. Or if someone has forgotten their work laptop at home, and has to turn the car around to retrieve it.

Parents are also very good at muttering this with disapproval if they see you playing video games on a weekend when you should… well, exactly what else should you be doing?
Time is money

The big lesson is that time is actually worth something. Companies pay employees based on time worked, which means that there is a dollar amount attached to every second of our every day.

But the relationship between time and money goes deeper than that.

Here are three connections between time and money that you need to know about:

1. Time-value of money: Time actually affects the value of money. A dollar earned today is worth more than a dollar earned next year, because of its ability to accrue interest—something of particular interest (long live the pun) to retirement planners and lottery winnersalike.
2. Cash-flow forecasting: For small businesses, another way that time interacts with money is in forecasting your cash flow, a necessary practice for any business, but particularly if you experience seasonal variability in cash streams. Looking into the future allows you to make wise financial decisions in the present—it’s time and money working side-by-side.
3. Music connection: (just for fun and since it’s almost the title) My dad taught me this one—he is fond of crooning show tunes from the mid-1900’s while working in the kitchen on Saturdays—Lefty Frizzell’s “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time” was a particular favourite of his. It’s this country song’s title lyric that leads us to…

The country contrapositive (also the title)

A contrapositive is just an “If-then” statement, reworded to be negative.

For example, someone could say “If I am Shrek, then I am green.” The contrapositive would be “If I am not green, I am not Shrek.” That’s easy to remember, right?

Then the contrapositive to “If you’ve got the money, I’ve got the time” is…

That’s right – “If I don’t got the time, you don’t got the money.”

Time is money, so how does your company track it?

At your small business, one often overlooked aspect of cash flow is employee time tracking.

It’s so important to track time correctly.

If a company relies on paper timesheets or the honor system, this exposes the company to unforeseen liability. Inaccurate time tracking leads to inflated payroll, inaccurate job costing, and miskept books.

Time is money. Every second counts, and every second is counted. That’s why it’s crucial to accurately record time so that it doesn’t lead to problems with cash flow.

Finding a time tracking software that replaces inaccurate paper timesheets, and has bonus features like scheduling and reporting tools, not only alleviates concern about cash flow, but it simplifies many of the workflows you already have in place in your business.

After all, as the small business owner, your time is money too.

Conclusion

Country songs, contrapositives, and my dad’s domestic broadway audition—what is the big takeaway here?

You should know now some of the many relationships between time and money.

Most importantly, it should be clear that since time is money, time tracking impacts every area of your business, not just payroll – but your cash flow too.

Finding the appropriate time tracking software is a great first step to making sure that you’ve got the money, honey—and the time.

So instead of trying to borrow from a single institution, a business can borrow from dozens, hundreds or even thousands of individual people. This is often an avenue explored by businesses who have been turned down for a loan from a bank. Applications can take as little as 10 minutes and approval rates are high.

Why use it?

You are more likely to get approved for a loan from a P2P lending company than from a bank, especially since banks started viewing smaller loans to smaller businesses as not worth the effort. According to the Small Business Lending Index in March 2016 big banks approved 23% of loans while alternative lenders (such as P2P) approved 60% of loan applications.

Speed

Banks typically take 2 weeks to review a loan application and (if successful) up to 60 days to deposit the money in your account, making the process lengthy and drawn out often with low success rates.

With P2P borrowing your application can take as little as 30 minutes to complete and 2 days to be approved by your lending platform, you will then list your opportunity for an average of 7-14 days (this varies based on the amount you seek) and the funds are typically deposited into your account within 1 week of your opportunity closing.

According to a 2015 report by the British Business Bank, ease of application was biggest reason SME’s gave for choosing a type of finance.

No Early Repayment

Furthermore, there are no fees for repaying your loan early, which isn’t always the case for loans from a bank.

By funding your business with P2P lending you can cut out legal fees (such as business loan arrangement fees), get a more competitive interest rate (between 7.9% and 12% for a business bank loan from Santander compared to 5.95% with a P2P loan from Lending Crowd) and negotiate more flexible terms.

Who uses it and what are the criteria?

While it is not yet widely used (The British Business Bank reports that in 2015 only 40% of SME’s were aware of P2P loans as an option), this form of financing suits businesses big and small, looking to raise working capital or funding to purchase assets.

Borrowing criteria varies from platform to platform but most require good credit, a minimum of 2 years filed accounts at Companies House or formally prepared accounts for non-limited businesses, minimum turnover of £50k and a good credit score.

However, unlike with banks your credit score is not the sole basis for a P2P loan. Lending sites such as Funding Circle take a much more holistic approach to approving applications.

Sam Hodges, co-founder and MD of Funding Circle advises:

“Before applying for a P2P loan, ensure your credit score is healthy, get your financials up-to-date and be ready to talk about your experience with credit and how a loan will make a positive impact on your business’ bottom line.”

Case study

When Edinburgh based IT company Sort My PC were looking to expand through acquisition they knew they needed to raise capital to make this happen. Instead of going through traditional financing routes Sort My PC’s managing director Gordon Sayers decided to try P2P lending to fund this venture.

They chose to do this through Lending Crowd, a P2P platform who are also based in Edinburgh, UK. Lending Crowd helped Sort My PC to craft their pitch and just 5 weeks after it went live they reached their target of £73,000 sourced from 25 individual investors.

The funding secured through LendingCrowd has given Gordon and the team the working capital they need in order to successfully grow the business, and in the time since they have completed another acquisition and moved to larger premises.