October 30th, 2009 by Alex Coté
Earlier I blogged about a story by George Cloutier in BusinessWeek’s The Turnaround Ace blog. Now that I’ve had some time to fully digest it, I have to say his advice is not only bad, but it’s also flat out wrong. Worse, it’s downright dangerous. It’s exactly the kind of counsel that can cause confusion [...]
October 29th, 2009 by Alex Coté
An article in BusinessWeek’s Turnaround Ace blog entitled “To Improve Cash Flow, Stall Payments to Vendors” is causing quite the reader negative reaction. The gist of the article: You should pay your vendors as slow as possible to help manage cash flow (in good time and bad). For the profiled company in the article they [...]
October 27th, 2009 by Alex Coté
Last week I received an email from a customer asking a simple question. “How do we go about contributing credit information about companies? If we run into problems with a customer, we would want the market to know what problems with payment we had.” The standard and historic answer that most credit bureaus like Cortera [...]
October 22nd, 2009 by Alex Coté
The good news: The vast majority of your customers and partners are paying their bills on time. The bad news: The delinquent minority is only getting worse. Having access to the A/R activities of millions of businesses provides us with a unique view into the nation’s cash flow. And since the beginning of the year, [...]
October 21st, 2009 by Alex Coté
Yesterday we focused on how companies in Nevada have the highest amount of past due accounts receivable debt in nation for the first 9 months of the year, giving the recession weary state another dubious distinction. On the flip side, businesses based in all 6 New England states have maintained better than average – or [...]
October 20th, 2009 by Alex Coté
Today we issued our monthly best and worst states in terms of the payment behavior of companies in those states. We started this reporting back in January and one data point has been consistent: the state of Nevada has remained at the top of worst performing states with over 25% of corporate receivables past due [...]
October 14th, 2009 by Alex Coté
On Monday, the New York Times detailed how the worsening credit conditions are affecting small businesses, as banks take on an increasingly risk adverse approach to lending and credit lines. Yesterday we talked about how small businesses are getting squeezed by increasingly late payments. Today, the Dow closed above the 10,000 mark for the first time in a year, buoyed by better than expected earnings from a few bellwethers and early signs of improving consumer confidence. The common thread in all of these events? Conditions do indeed seem to be improving for many of the nation’s large businesses. Unfortunately, a dual credit crunch conspires to thwart similar growth by the small businesses that make up the majority of the nation’s jobs engine and 50% of the GDP.
October 13th, 2009 by Jim Swift
A few weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal explained how small companies are getting paid more slowly by their large company customers while those same large companies are forcing the little guys to pay faster. Well, Cortera’s data is showing that the little guys are getting paid more slowly by their small business customers, too.
October 7th, 2009 by Alex Coté
As covered in past Cortera SCI reports, confidence in sales normally spurs companies to grow inventories with the belief that they will be able to move those goods in the future. Cash flow to suppliers tends to tightly match the demand for their goods by the end customer. In a healthy economy companies are paying [...]
