Since 1997, this stationery business, based in Surrey, has enjoyed rapid and sustained growth. The company has a substantial ledger, comprising over 500 customers, and this is characterised by a high volume of relatively low value transactions. As such, the principal requirement for the business was for a very active and comprehensive credit control programme. The company also recognised that they would require an even better service to expand at the speed required to meet increasing customer demand.

Whilst the company was growing significantly, the directors still felt that the business was being held back by their previous factoring company. Neil, Director of the stationery company explains, "We were previously dealing with a bank-owned factoring company. We found that the relationship was becoming increasingly strained as we were being confronted by rules and regulations and petty procedures all of the time. For example, small underpayments and overpayments, which should have been written off, were being flagged up on exception reports, allocations were not being made correctly and payments to us were delayed as a result." Neil continued, "I have always appreciated that there is a lot going on within our account due to the large number of transactions being processed. Since this is such an intensive workload account, we needed a finance company that would be prepared to understand our ledger and the nature of our customers quickly and thoroughly. To get to the next stage of growth, we recognised that we needed to make a change and we were approached by SME Invoice Finance at that time."

SME Invoice Finance put in place a £300,000 factoring line based on an 80% invoice prepayment facility, immediately generating a high percentage of finance availability. SME put in place a dedicated team of experienced credit management and collections personnel to handle the account.

"Since we started dealing with SME Invoice Finance we haven't looked back.", said Neil. "They have reduced our transactions charges overall, freed up my time to focus on the more important aspects of running the business and I no longer have to worry that sufficient levels of working capital are in place."

He adds, "In the market, all suppliers can compete on 'price'. However, SME Invoice Finance is not only highly competitive on cost grounds but also provides the type of high quality personal service to us that we pride ourselves on offering to large corporations. As a smaller company than the bank-owned factors, SME comes across as caring more about our business at an individual client level and meeting our specific needs. We also value the fact that it is good to deal with local people and we meet once a month with SME for a regular update to review credit control actions. They have even become customers of ours in their own right, which also shows they are supportive of us."

"I would say that SME Invoice Finance is at least 400% better than the bank we used to deal with. SME delivers, it's as simple as that - it just gets done!"

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