Asset-based lending and receivables factoring

Factoring receivable invoices is the sale of an asset - your company's invoices. The sale of your invoices to a third party - known as a Factor - eliminates the sale-to-collection business cycle of waiting for a customer payment. Usually, factoring companies will purchase your invoices for up to 90% of the total amount. You get your cash now and the factor takes on the risk of collecting the payments from your customers. The creditworthiness of your customers is very important if you want to get a good rate from a factor.

What are the specific advantages?


  • Immediate cash with no waiting and without incurring new debt: You receive quick payment following invoicing.

  • To factor, your business credit rating is not an issue because you are not borrowing money

  • Efficient handling of all your invoicing and data entry

  • Relief from the responsibility for collecting no-pay and slow-pay clients

  • You have expanded growth capacity through increased production and total sales

  • Ability to take advantage of vendor discounts

How to implement factoring in GP?

I have done a number of implementations where accounts receivable factoring was necessary, and one way -- read, they may be other methods, but this is what worked for my clients -- I have found is by using the National Accounts functionality in GP, where the factoring company becomes a national account and all customers are child records of the national account. Lets take a look:

1) Setup your factoring company as a customer tied to the checkbook ID where funds from the factoring company are deposited.


















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2) Setup your factoring company as a national account and add your customers as child records to the national account.



















*Click on image to enlarge

3) If you receive check or payments from your customers, just forward them to your factoring company. This is not a common occurrence in this scenario, but if you do receive checks from your customers, there is no need to record these in Dynamics GP.

4) When you receive the funds and payment report from the factoring company, enter a cash receipt for the amount reflected on the report. When you post the cash receipt, don't forget to do a bank deposit. This will reflect the funds in your account.













* Click on image to enlarge

5) Apply the cash receipt from the factoring company to the invoices reflected on the report. Because of factoring, invoices will be short. Writeoff the difference to the factoring expense account you have created.

















* Click on image to enlarge

















* Click on image to enlarge

NOTE: If you have a high volume of transactions, you can request a file from the factoring company to be used with Integration Manager.

Overall, what I like about this approach is, your company still does not loose track of the invoces owed by your customers, you can still run receivable agings that will allow you to estimate how much your outstanding invoices are worth allowing greather visibility on cash flow -- remember, your fees will increase depending on the age of the invoices held by the factoring company.

Until next post!

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com/

Comments

Anonymous said…
Using this method, are you still doing journal entries to record the liability, or are you doing through National Accounts setup?
Mariano Gomez said…
Not sure I understand what liability you are referring to. Could you please clarify?
Anonymous said…
I have a customer who will sell their AR to a factoring company, getting up to 80% cash, but if the customer doesn't pay the factoring company within 90 days, the factoring company will look to the seller to get that money back. Very common in staffing industries. So we need to record the liability of cash received before we know that factoring company was paid by the customer.
Mariano Gomez said…
This is clear now. What you can do in such cases is setup the factoring company as a vendor and record an invoice to the factory company.

You can then use Customer/Vendor consolidation (or simple credit memos in AR, and invoices in AP) to consolidate any balances for moneys owed to the factoring company if a customer defaults.

Best regards,

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP
Maximum Global Business, LLC
http://www.maximumglobalbusiness.com
Ian Stewart said…
Good article Mariano. Very good use of existing functionality.
Anonymous said…
We do not have National Accounts in our instance of GP, what would you suggest?
Ramon said…
HI -

What if some invoices for a customer are factored and other invoices are not factored. How do you suggest handling that?

thank you
Ramon Lopez
Mariano Gomez said…
Ramón,

You can create two customer classes: FACTORED and NONFACTORED. The factored customers can be addressed as outlined in the article, the non-factored customers are managed through the standard functionality. As for the latter, you won't be adding these to the national account factoring company.

MG.-
Mariano Gomez, MVP

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