If you own a recruitment business, you’ll be familiar with some, or all, these common cash flow struggles:
Note: If you’re ready to jump straight in and try Satago invoice financing, along with the other cash flow tools our platform offers, get started today with your 14-day free trial.
There are a few ways to get started with recruitment finance:
If you’ve been shopping around for invoice finance, you’ll know that invoice factoring companies will give an indicative quote before you apply, then you’ll shortlist a couple to take forward and fill out a formal application. Typically, the application process can be a good indication of how easy the facility will be to manage day to day.
Satago is an all-in-one cashflow management platform that enables SMEs to access invoice financing with just a few clicks, set up automatic credit control and analyse risk insights before working with a customer.
To get started with Satago:
We pride ourselves on doing invoice finance a bit differently to most lenders:
You may like: How Satago is changing the invoice financing game with embedded finance
To be eligible for Satago invoice financing you must:
If you’re confident that you understand invoice financing well (including invoice discounting and factoring), and you know exactly what you're looking for, come directly to us to get set up.
To see this in practice, we can take the example of a recruitment agency that was providing temporary staff across the UK, specialising in the property, surveying, construction and conveyancing sectors. Because of the breadth of sectors they served, and geographical spread of their customer base, there was a lot of fluctuation in revenue, creating unwanted cash gaps.
They didn’t need full invoice financing: they needed targeted cash injections on an ad-hoc basis. With Satago’s selective invoice financing option, they could pick and choose where they needed support. Selective invoice financing worked as a great short-term fix, allowing the company to take on new clients and opportunities without worrying about cash flow gaps.
Read the full case study here: Satago Supports UK-Wide Recruitment Agency Future Growth Plans with Flexible Invoice Finance
If you’re unsure of the best solution for you, it might be best to go through a finance broker.
Brokers have knowledge of the whole market and will be able to suggest the best options for you. A good broker will make sure you have the documentation you need for your application and will manage the process from start to finish.
If you decide to go down this route, ask for recommendations to make sure you find a good broker, or check reviews online.
As you research invoice financing solutions, you’ll see that some solutions offer back-office recruitment services, while others stick to invoice financing. Which one is best for you? If you choose an end-to-end solution including invoice finance specifically for the recruitment industry, you get the added service of the agency handling back-office support and payroll.
When might you choose to use a specialist recruitment factoring agency?
While this business finance option is perfect for some recruitment companies, it doesn’t work for others. When does it make more sense to choose a regular invoice funding solution?
While Satago isn’t tailored specifically to recruiters, it’s still a great solution for recruitment companies that offers other useful tools alongside invoice finance, to really help boost your business.
When you join Satago, you get access to a suite of tools including time-saving and fully customisable automated credit control emails, plus risk insight reports that can give you valuable insights into your current and prospective customers and their creditworthiness.
When you’re a recruiter offering your clients credit terms, getting paid as quickly as possible is vital. People often have very genuine but avoidable reasons for paying late – perhaps they were busy and forgot or were simply disorganised – an invoice reminder sent at the right time can make both of your lives easier.
The Satago platform features a range of automated and fully customisable emails, which are available on all packages:
Not only can you customise the email content, but you can tailor the sending schedule and frequency to suit your purposes. While some accounting software provides invoice reminder templates, Satago offers increased customisation options to build more detailed payment reminders.
Automating your credit control emails is so much easier than sending them manually, even if you do use templated email content. This is especially true if you have no dedicated credit control department, or there’s just one person manually sending emails and acknowledging receipt of payments.
A grouped reminder email is ideal if a client has multiple unpaid invoices due, as it combines all the invoices into one email reminder. This means your client isn’t bombarded with emails reminding them about individual invoices.
Read more: Debtor Days Calculator: How to Reduce the Time it Takes to Get Paid
When you’re starting a new client relationship, it’s useful to have as much information about them as possible up front so you can plan how to approach their credit terms and credit control.
With Satago risk insights you have access to:
Credit search: Here you can view reports on existing or prospective clients. You can view an unlimited number of snapshot summaries of clients, but you’ll also have access to a certain number of complete credit reports each year, depending on the plan you choose (Standard = 3, Plus = 25, Premium = unlimited).
The full credit report includes detailed information on directors and shareholders, financials, mortgages, CCJs, and can also be printed or saved as PDF.
Having this information available to you helps you make data-based decisions about how you work with your clients – for example in the credit terms you offer, and the wording and schedule of your reminder emails.
The Satago platform will help your customers pay on time, which in turn helps you to get back in control of your cash flow. And it does all this inside one tool, so there’s no need to juggle multiple pieces of software to manage your business accounts, cash flow and credit control.
You can use Satago to:
In this article we’ve covered how important invoice finance can be for recruitment companies, to help you bridge the cash flow gap between paying your contractors and being paid by your clients. We’ve also looked at the different options available to you.
If you’re on a tight budget, you want to stay in full control of your business, or you just want to test how invoice finance would work for you, Satago could be a great option, and the extra tools that come as part of the platform will allow you to streamline and improve your cash flow.
Get started with Satago today with a 14-day free trial and see how our invoice finance and cash flow tools can benefit your recruitment company.