Having unpaid debt can be a stressful obstacle to manage. You may feel that it can be threatening your business which only makes that stress worse. Fortunately, there are way to control your debt and get your business back on track. These are some steps you can take to improve your cash flow and manage your business debt.
Assess your small business debt.
Business debt can be negatively affecting your cash flow and keeping you from meeting your business goals. Before taking any initial steps, you should review your financial situation, create a detailed plan or edit your pre-existing budget plan. A new budget plan will help you assess what are your daily, monthly and annual expenses. This can allow you to see what expenses you can cut back on and which expenses contributed to your debt in the first place. Not only will a budget plan help you create a financial plan, it will force you to be honest with yourself about what you owe and how you can pay it back.
Evaluate your small-business debt before acting upon it.
Enforce consistent payment policies!
An issue many small businesses face is having unpaid client invoices. This negatively impacts your cash flow and makes managing your cash flow extremely difficult. Fortunately, you have two options for solving this issue. Firstly, you can enforce stricter payment and collection policies, also consider establishing consequences for late payments. Regulating reminders through phone calls or emails will actively keep your clients aware of their payments. The second option is to consider factoring your invoices to a factoring company. These factoring companies collect payment from your customer directly, and you receive your money without taking on any additional debt.
Evaluate your small-business debt before acting upon it.
Limit spending and spend your cash.
You can consider paying with cash if you can. Paying any expenses with a credit card or a line of credit will only add to your small business debt. If you begin paying bills with cash instead of credit, you will not increase your debt, you will not start paying more interest and you will only spend what you can afford.
Negotiate with creditors and lenders.
It never hurts to try to negotiate with creditors and lenders to give you access to a better rate, better repayment terms or a lower monthly payment. If you are managing multiple loans, consider consolidating to just one small-business loan allowing you to make just one payment – perhaps with lower payment rates. Instead of having to keep track of multiple due dates, you can have just one.