Small businesses: Keeping the dream alive

Running a company, however large or small, is fraught with many ups and downs, and in particular smaller, recently-established companies face a multitude of hurdles.

Setting up as a company finally accomplished, entrepreneurs next face the task of keeping the dream alive. It has to be faced – simply having the starting capital and getting going is ultimately the easy part.

Obtaining and maintaining customers, potentially managing and paying for staff and generally keeping up with the latest trends in technology in order to keep up with the global competition can stretch a small company’s finance option like invoice finance to unbelievable limits.

Advertising has to be done and paid for because without it, there is no hope of staying in there with the competition. Let’s face it if no one knows a company exists, business is unlikely to come their way.

This can, however, be expensive fun. Even for companies with few other overheads, such as staff, etc, advertising alone can run into huge amounts. This is all very well for an established company with a firm customer base keeping them afloat.

For a business just starting out, though, finances can be tight. Setting some of the funds that are coming in aside for specific purposes, such as advertising, to stay with this particular example is an absolute must.

Preferably, the funds should be invested somewhere where they can earn some interest and so increase while they are not being used. Care needs to be taken, however, to ensure that the funds can be accessed as and when required.

This will typically rule out long term investments. The majority of long term options make it impossible to get at funds until a specified period of time reaches its end.

The same problem applies to many short-term options. Although these types tend to offer the best returns, they cannot be used if funds need to be freely accessible.

Keeping the money in ordinary business accounts may earn a tiny amount in rates, but is not likely to achieve much. Comparing a range of different choices available will, though, reveal another option, which will be ideal for the purpose of earning slightly better rates without locking funds away for any particular period.

Naturally, choices here will have to be carefully examined and compared before making a commitment, but this is easy enough and investors will find that some of the rates offered here are better than those on typical ordinary current accounts will offer.

This opportunity to invest funds at reasonably good rates without losing access is presented by a type of account that sits somewhere between the so-called instant access and current accounts.

The type of option in mind is known as easy access accounts. Rates are typically higher than those on current accounts, but access is just as simple. No penalties will be applied for withdrawals and many of them do not have a minimum or maximum deposit limits. Click here to know how factoring will help free up cash.