Receivable financing companies just might be the ‘ new and improved ‘ solution to your business cash flow challenge. Factoring companies are providing solutions that in many cases Canadian chartered banks are unable to provide based on their more severe credit requirements for borrowers.Why then should a business owner of financial manager be looking at a receivable financing facility? That’s a typical question posed by business owners who sit down with our firm to discuss their finance challenges.The simple reason is pretty basic – accelerated business cash flow. From the day you generate an invoice and make a sale your company is eligible for immediate cash. And the good news is that you can finance all your sales and invoices, or only partially draw on a basis that suits your needs. Most companies have their own cash flow cycle, including the seasonality of the industry they are in.We have mentioned that in spite of accounts receivable financing rates ( they are higher than bank financing ) this type of corporate finance solution has become the de facto alternative to traditional business credit lines. More so for the small and medium sized business in Canada, also know as the ‘ SME ‘ sector. But don’t be surprised when we tell you than many larger firms use a flavor of this method of finance also.Why is being ‘ cash flow positive ‘ so important in today’s biz world? Simply because competition is tougher than ever and your ability to enhance your reputation with suppliers and customers is critical. It gives your firm ‘professional visibility ‘.There are in fact other forms of short term cash flow financing including sale leasebacks, financing sr&ed tax credits, short term working capital loans based on solely your sales volume, etc. A/R factor financing collateralizes your receivables, but not other assets.Business clients will always ask if there is an ‘ upper limit ‘ to the amount that factoring companies will provide against their sales. The answer is there is no upper funding limit! Your sales revenue becomes almost an automatic ATM machine!If there is one solution that we recommend against all others for a receivable financing facility it’s a ‘ Confidential ‘ facility. It allows you to bill and collect your own receivables and achieve all the benefits of this type of solution.If you’re focusing on almost daily ‘ cash flow survival ‘ it might be time to recognize the finance solution is right in front of you – A/R finance!Seek out and speak to a trusted, credible and experienced Canadian business financing advisor with a track record of success in business finance.
Financing the Purchase of a Car
Buying a car is usually the second biggest investment in a persons life, and financing the purchase of a car is commonplace now days, especially if the vehicle in question is of any substantial value. For most people, buying a new or used car of any worth outright for cash simply isn’t possible, and so car finance gives you the option to purchase, and ultimately own a vehicle that you may not otherwise be able to, much like how a mortgage is taken out to pay for a house.Even if you do have the savings, or means to buy a car out right, it is still sometimes a more sensible option to finance the purchase, as it allows you to release your money bit by bit in a controlled manner, instead of having all of it tied up in a vehicle, that could potentially get stolen, written off or simply depreciate in value considerably.The car finance industry is massive and if you are considering financing the purchase of a new car, there are a number of things to consider and be aware of, in order to help you get approved car finance. There are a number of different sources to apply for, and obtain car finance, with the obvious one being from the vehicle dealership itself, but you could also obtain finance from the major banks and online financial institutions and companies.Financing the purchase of a vehicle through the dealership is usually the most convenient option, however there are a few things you should be mindful of before approaching one. Financing through a dealership can often be ‘high pressure’, this is usually because the salesperson will be working on a commission basis so will be pushing for certain add ons and packages that, on the outset, may look worthwhile, but ultimately may end up costing you considerably more. Things like insurances, extended warranties, and extra options for the actual vehicle itself to push the sale value up are all examples of these commission based ad ons, and if you are financing, it can be harder to see the extra amount these things cost as they are effectively ‘hidden’ and divided over the monthly payments, or term of the loan.Obtaining car finance away from the dealership with a bank or online institution can give you more control without the pressure of the sales push, and, once approved, you then have your budget and know exactly how much you can spend, which again, gives you more control when negotiating a price with a salesperson. However, because the finance has nothing to do with the dealership, or wherever you’re actually purchasing the vehicle from, you may not get as much support and after sales care as you would if you financed the purchase through them.When applying for vehicle finance, there are a number of different factors that determine whether you get approved, and if you do, what rate you will pay. Interest rates can vary vastly and probably the most influential factor on the interest rate offered to you will be your credit history. Put simply, the better your credit rating, the lower the rate will be, and the worse it is, the higher the amount you pay back to the lender will be, due to an increased rate.Another major factor impacting on the interest rate of car finance is the term of the loan – i.e the actual time period it will be paid back over. Usually, the shorter the period, the lower the rate, and it increases correspondingly as the term period is extended. Also, if you are wanting to finance the purchase of a used car, you will probably have to pay a higher rate than if you are buying a brand new vehicle, so this is an important factor to consider before buying. Your address and geographic location can also have an influence on the interest rate offered, as can your profession, and work history etc, so when applying for car finance, be prepared to answer a number of questions based around these areas.Before going to a dealership to purchase and finance a car, it is a good idea to do some research and be aware of current rates and offers from competing companies and banks so that you are not entering into it completely blind, and can bring then up during the application process if necessary, to aid you in any negotiations.When financing the purchase of a vehicle of any substantial value, you will most likely have to pay a deposit up front, which will represent a minimum percentage of the overall value of the vehicle, and demonstrates your commitment to the lender and the dealership, as well as helping to cover any admin costs etc. It is always advisable to put down as much as you can afford on the deposit, especially if it is an expensive car, as this will help to lower the monthly payments, give you a little breathing space and control, lessen the likely hood of you going into negative equity if you want to get rid of the vehicle, and also increase the likelihood of you getting approved for the car finance in the first place.This is probably the most important thing to consider when financing the purchase of a valuable vehicle. If, at some point down the line of the agreement, you become unable to continue paying the monthly payments, or if you simply don’t want the car any longer for whatever reason, you want to either effectively be able to hand it back to the dealership without owing anything outstanding, or to sell it yourself privately without having to cover any potentially sizable negative equity before doing so, and it is your initial deposit that can help prevent this from happening in most cases.It is never a good idea to finance the purchase of a car with a very low, or even nil deposit, as it will likely result in your payments being much greater, and if you want to release or sell the car you could very well still owe the lender more than the current value of the vehicle itself, as many vehicles (especially brand new ones) can depreciate in value considerably and surprisingly quickly after the purchase, so put down as much as you can up front to cover yourself for any such eventualities.Before committing, you should ensure you are completely aware of the total financed amount as this will properly illustrate to you the amount you are ultimately paying for the car and whether it is actually worth it or not. Generally speaking, you should consider car finance as long as you can obtain a competitive interest rate and sensible terms that will allow you to comfortably afford the monthly payment, and you should also be able to comfortably put a decent deposit down up front that represents a substantial percentage of the overall value, and to finally remember that even if you can comfortably afford the deposit and monthly payments, whether or not the overall financed amount is actually representative of the actual worth of the vehicle you want to own.
8 Reasons to Choose Commercial Library Instead of Open-Source One
Open-source software solutions, including components and libraries, are the preferred choice for many developers who need to solve some particular task or add a feature to the software being developed. Yet commercial libraries can offer more than you can think of.Open-source software (i.e. software offered under free licenses with freely accessible source code) gains popularity day by day. The reason is obvious – price drops for the end-user software make it harder to invest cash into software development beforehand. And in case of in-house activities stiffer IT budgets make programmers choose code snippets of unidentified quality.However while open-source libraries and code snippets seem to have zero initial cost of use, they start to consume resources later, during life cycle of your software. And commercial libraries can offer more than you can think of.I will focus on professionally developed commercial solutions: putting a price tag on your code piece doesn’t magically turns the code into the industry-level commercial product. Commercial library must be evaluated thoroughly to answer the question of how professional it is. Not everything with a price tag is good, that’s obvious. But if it’s commercial, chances are great that you will get the things missing in open-source offerings.Let’s review what exactly commercial software (and specifically component and class libraries for software developers) can offer, and then discuss objections and counter-objections.Documentation and samples. With modern APIs becoming increasingly complex documentation and samples allow easier and faster code reuse. You just copy the piece of code from the sample and it just works. If you need guidance, you can look into documentation to figure out where to go next or why the function could fail.Adepts of open-source software claim that the source code is the best documentation. Maybe it can work as documentation when the code itself is well-documented, with comments and well-written (with proper formatting and variable and function names). In most cases the code is not the most entertaining reading in the world though.Various studies show that presence of source code sometimes helps in diagnostics of various issues, but does not help much in use of the software simply because you don’t know what to look for.Also documentation should be written by technical writers, not programmers – programmers don’t like and don’t know how to write proper documentation. Let programmers do coding and technical writers write text.Carefully crafted APIs Any software as a complex engineering product requires design and development before it can be implemented in bare metal in code. Writing 1000 lines of code from scratch is not the same as designing those 1000 lines beforehand and then implementing the design. Proper design can turn 1000 lines of code into 200, and bad design would lead to 10K lines of code that needs to be written.When it comes to open-source libraries, many of them are developed evolutionary, i.e. something small is created, then features are added like new toys on the new year tree. And in the end you get the construct that is as fragile as a new year tree.In opposite, commercial APIs are in most cases designed with both ease of use and extensibility in mind. Often there are several levels of APIs in there, for low-level operations (where you get maximum control) and for high-level tasks (where you an get the job done quickly).Finally, open-source libraries are mainly developed by coders, while professional commercial solutions are usually designed by software architects and analysts, and only then coded by programmers.Unique featuresAs the goal of open-source developers is to deliver something and do this fast, usually only the most popular functionality in certain application domain is implemented.Developers of commercial libraries have to stand out of the crowd and implementing wider scope of functionality is one method to accomplish this task.The problem of extensibility (i.e. getting a feature that you need) can not be easily solved with open-source other than coding the feature yourself, which is almost always not an option, especially when the issue to be addressed is far from your area of expertise. With commercial software you can negotiate the extension to be made for you or to be included into the future software releases.The motivation of the commercial vendor is to keep his business running, and this is the effective motivation. For open-source developer even one-time fee you can pay him can be not sufficient to motivate the developer to extend the product (which could have been abandoned long time ago, as it frequently happens in open-source world).One more benefit of unique features offered by the component vendor is that such features let you create a USP (unique selling point) of the end-user software that you create. And when you do in-house development, those feature let you please the boss and show your attitude towards helping your colleagues and the business itself to act efficiently. In other words, those features show that you care about your user.ReliabilityOne of the most valuable assets of every business is trust of its customers. You can’t run a business for a long time when customers don’t trust you. And in software business, where relations are long-term and information flies easily, trust is a must.When the bug is encountered, it’s the best interest for the commercial vendor to fix it, or trust will be lost. And the customer needs to be assured, that should the issue arise it will be addressed in the shortest possible time.With open-source libraries, even if you submit a bug (when the developer provided you with such possibility), you usually have little hope for this bug become fixed in any foreseeable future. In opposite, bug fixing is sometimes offered by open-source developers for a fee that far exceeds the cost of the license for comparable commercial product.MaintenanceIT world is about links and connections between various actors – servers and services, client systems, mobile devices etc. With so many actors, changes and updates are frequent and you have the environment to which your software must adapt all the time. Otherwise you get compatibility problems, dissatisfied and complaining customers and finally business losses.When you use third-party components in your software, they need to be adapted as well. And as with new features, adaptation of third-party components and libraries is much easier when the author is motivated for this.Also for the running business maintenance and compatibility updates are one of the ways to inform their users that the business can be relied upon. So there exists a big chance that the required adaptation will be performed by the vendor even without your request.ExpertiseIt’s not a secret that you often don’t need a third-party code when you can write this code yourself. That is true for general-purpose code, but can you take the risk doing the same in low-level programming or neural networking, OCR or cryptography?No person is a specialist in everything, that’s why we have so many different professions and specialists that focus on some one particular question.Commercial vendors, especially those offering specialized software and components, use services of such narrow specialists to provide high-quality products. The vendor has a specialist in the application domain (eg. in OCR or networking), a specialist in software design and a specialist in programming environments and computer platforms. Cooperation between those specialists lets you get a reliable product. But in case of open-source this is a rare situation. Specialists in application domains most often prefer doing their job for money and spend free time with their families and hobbies. It’s hard (though not impossible) to find a specialist who is a good software architect and programmer at the same time.As a consequence, with commercial software you usually get a product of the higher quality (not just programming quality but quality of the application domain) than in case of open-source.AssistanceInitial development of the open-source software is often driven by curiosity, desire for publicity and other similar emotional factors. This works well for a short time, usually enough for initial development, but not for maintenance and especially not for assisting you with the product. In other words, if you need help, you need to search for it anywhere you can… or pay for it to the developers.As with bug-fixing the cost of such individual assistance services usually exceeds the cost of the license for commercial software. The reason is simple – the business of the commercial vendor is based on insurance model, where total development and support expenses are spread among all licenses sold no matter how much support you “consume” (extra support packages are sometimes offered as well, but the overall scheme is the one described). In case of open-source products the only source to compensate development and support is to charge you for everything possible.Investment in futureThe “save tomorrow for tomorrow, think about today instead” mantra has brought humanity to the edge of ecological catastrophe. Apple’s bias towards end-users (which is just a cloak for desire to sell more hardware) has hut the whole software industry badly. People are used to pay 0 to 1 dollar for software and then ask “what? Do I have to pay another $0.99 for a new version of the software title that I’ve been using for 3 years? Are you insane?”. That attitude poisons the industry and slows down innovation. For some time the race for the first places in the AppStore and Play Store will make developers invest their time and resources into software titles, but calculations and studies show, that this race is more of a lottery with a little chance for small developers to succeed.Paying for software and motivating the users to pay as well is a culture of consuming the software which will let the ISV industry, and especially small vendors, continue to innovate in future and do this with satisfactory budgets.Finally, if you don’t pay for books you read, writers will stop writing and there will be no new literature to steal to read. If nobody pays for software now, there will be no skilled vendors in 5-10 years and no good and sophisticated software. Unlike music records, software vendors can’t give software away for free and do something else for living – that’s not a viable business model. So they will simply go out of business, and the world will become full of open-source stuff, unsupported and of unknown quality.Objections* There are many open-source titles, which deliver exceptional quality. Yes, there do exist software titles (mainly end-user and server software, rarely libraries) which are open-source and which offer great value. But if you look carefully, most of them are (a) commercial products, just sponsored by big companies or institutions, (b) often free only for non-commercial use but who reads those EULAs, (c) not as great as initially seems, with internal management problems, bloated code and design and implementation flaws that lead to necessity to rewrite the titles from scratch from time to time.* Open-source is free and nothing can beat such price. Yes, the cheese in the mouse trap is also free. But unlike the mouse trap, free software is a trap for each mouse involved. There are costs involved in maintenance and bug-fixing and in migrating to other solutions later if the chosen open-source stuff suddenly stops working. And such costs can exceed the initial costs of the commercial solution in a several powers, especially if you try to rely business processes on free solutions. Even when you keep using the open-source solution, assistance either needs to be paid or you need to hope that someone in programming community helps you for free (with absolutely no guarantee).* Open-source offers source code. Yes, and so do most commercial libraries. Commercial end-user software is rarely offered with source code, that’s true, but as mentioned, there’s very little use in such source code (other than to satisfy curiosity).* Open-source is documented. Yes, with mystifying comments and unreadable and badly formatted code. Wiki and publicly maintained knowledgebases are a weak substitute to professionally written documentation.* I can ask for samples in the programming community. You can ask but this doesn’t promise you the answer, neither you get a guarantee of the quality of the provided answer. The fact that something works in one particular case doesn’t prove reliability of the solution in real-life conditions.* Open-source has as much features as commercial software. Yes, the feature list can be the same initially although this needs proof: commercial libraries have to stand out and features are a good method. In any case extensibility of open-source software is lower due to lack of the main driving force for such extensibility and often due to bad design.* Open-source software has great APIs. Yes, and shamans can sometimes offer good medical services. But it’s a better idea to go to the hospital.* I can modify the open-source product myself. Yes, and you can do the same with the source code of the commercial library.* Open-source can also deliver unique features. Yes it can, but only for some time. All easy (and inexpensive) unique features become common quite fast. And really unique features need resources to be implemented.* Open-source is better tested due to larger audience. “It’s better tested” doesn’t mean better quality. It means only more bugs in the bug tracker. And as bug fixing is generally slower in open-source than in commercial software, the latter one has a better chance to be of higher quality.* the open-source library I use worked fine for me for years. Yes, in closed environments and in simple tasks the code which has been tested once will work for years and decades. However if this code communicates or interacts with other software and network, changes of external actors can bring your business down in minutes, and when this happens, you will have very little time to react.* I have very simple tasks where no expertise is needed and where open-source works for me. A match (the one to get the light with) is a trivial thing. Or is it? The components of the match were developed for decades by numerous scientists in chemistry, biology and physics. Things you consider trivial now are the result of years and centuries of scientific research. And in software there are no trivial tasks and no trivial solutions.* I can get assistance from community, I don’t need a paid service. And you surely ask community for health care, legal services, car repair services etc. But this is not effective and is like playing with fire – one incompetent suggestion can get you into serious trouble. Professional services are a must for any activity of the modern civilization.