What Are The Sources Of Business Cash?
For any business there are essentially two sources of finance: money generated within the business itself, and money introduced into the business from outside.
How a business can be run so as to generate the maximum amounts of cash internally and use this as efficiently as possible (bootstrapping) has already been largely covered in the previous chapters where it can be seen that this is a matter of the following.
The range of sources of external finance will be covered in detail in section B and divides into three broad categories.
DebtWithin grants I would include soft loans which are loans (a form of debt) but on favourable or discounted terms.
EquityEquity is money or other assets put into a business by investors in return for their share of the profits of the business after the creditors have been paid.At its simplest this is the personal capital put into or retained in a business by its proprietor or partners or the investment in shares and retained earnings by its shareholders.
However, it can become more complex: for example, where a business has acquired an investment from a third party such as another individual investor like a business angel, or an institution such as a venture capitalist, or from the public and/or institutions by way of a listing on a stock exchange.These situations may lead to different classes of shares being issued with differing rights to:
There are many good books on business planning available (see www.howtobooks.co.UK ) but essentially any business plan needs to cover:
You also need to understand the lender's or potential investor's perspective and what they are looking for in any proposal.
Of course each lender or investor will have their own financial criteria on which to assess a proposal, but over and above this most will also have a wider ranging set of sometimes informal criteria which any proposal has to meet.
A good starting point is an old banker's acronym, CAMPARI (Character, Ability, Means, Purpose, Amount, Repayment, Insurance), capturing seven key criteria as listed below. This is one of a number of traditional checklists that bankers have for assessing any proposal (another version is known as the 7Ss but covers much the same ground). In my view any investment proposal will need to cover the points raised to the satisfaction of almost any external lender or investor.
CharacterNo one knowingly gives their money to a crook or a fool if they want to get it back (with a return).A track record of previous financial problems such as County Court Judgements, mortgage arrears or even insolvency proceedings (collectively known as adverse) is not necessarily a bar to obtaining funding. But it does tend to make it more expensive, as lenders and investors will want to build in an extra return required in light of the apparent extra risk involved in so called sub prime or non-status lending.
A track record of dishonesty can make raising finance extremely difficult, if not impossible, but even here I can think of a small number of ex-criminals who have gone on to run successful businesses which will have required financing.
AbilityHowever good your proposal, the lender or investor has to be confident that you can make it happen.From a financial management point of view the more that you can demonstrate that you have future proofed your business by having and using good management information including forecasts, so that you can have finance in place before you need it, the better. No funder likes surprises. If you can foresee a requirement for cash coming then you have the time and information with which to speak to your funders about how to cover it.
The alternative is that you blunder into a cash crisis and end up writing cheques that take you over your agreed limit, which leaves the bank with the decision whether to meet the payment or to return it, something they dislike doing. One banker described this situation to me as application for overdraft by way of cheque, and it was the equivalent of the owners raising a red flag over their business saying I am not in control of my finances.
MeansHow much are you worth (both as a guide to your past money making performance and your ability to provide cash to cover any short-term problems)? PurposeYou don't just go to the time, trouble and expense of raising or borrowing money for the sake of it. You do it because you have a plan.Your plan therefore has to set out clearly what commitment you are making to the project, together with a clear picture of the further support you need (how much, how long, how it is to be paid back).
Repayment/ReturnJust as you do not go to the trouble of raising cash unless you have a plan that requires it, lenders and investors do not take the trouble and risk putting money into a plan unless they can see what and how they are going to:As discussed above, your plan should already show how long you will need the money for and how is it to be repaid. But it also needs to show what interest a lender is going to earn, or return an investor is going to make on their money if they provide it.
The funder's job will then be to assess what risk your plan calls for them to take and whether the reward offered is commensurate with this.
Banks will typically have a matrix which gives the manager an interest charge that needs to be obtained for a given level of risk assessed as being taken by the bank.
Many investors will work on the basis of calculating the value today of the cash they expect to earn on the investment from dividends, repayments and growth in value of their shares over the period of the investment. This is done by applying an annual discount to the future streams of cash on the principle that £1 received today is worth more than £1 in a year's time, which in turn is worth more than £1 in two years' time and so on (see Chapter 11 for more details).
By applying this sort of approach to arrive at a discounted cashflow the investor can then calculate what this equates to as a rate of return on the proposed investment (known as the internal rate of return or IRR). They can then judge whether this provides a sufficiently high return for the risk involved.
InsuranceThis means insurance for the lender in a somewhat colloquial sense: what assurance is there that they will get their money back? In practice for institutional lenders this translates into what sort of security is available to enable the loan to be repaid if the business is not able to make the instalments from:Additionally, many lenders and investors will need you to take out insurance cover (eg key man life cover) as part of their insurance that their money is safe.
What Are The Issues To Be Aware Of?When thinking about the sources of finance for your business there are a number of issues that you will need to take into account. AppropriatenessThe need to match the type of funding (long- or short-term) to the underlying requirement has already been discussed at length. Gearing And Financial RiskThe advantages in increasing the shareholders' rate of return and reducing the requirement for the owners to put up their own cash to finance the business through using borrowed funds, has to be balanced against the increased financial risk of default borne by the business. Scalability And FlexibilityBear in mind that your finance does not simply need to support your business today, but into the future too, so ensure that your financing arrangements are flexible enough to be able to support your future plans and prospects, so that for example growth does not expose you to the risks of overtrading, or you are able to reduce your exposure if required. Reliability And Attitude To RiskEnsure that you understand to what extent you can rely on your sources of funding. Are your funders in with you for the long-term or short? What is their attitude to risk? Are they likely to support you through bad times as well as good and if not, what should you be doing about this? CertaintyHow certain is it that the finance being discussed will actually be made available in the agreed form by the investor or lender? Until you have actually signed the documentation and drawn down the funds there is always an element of uncertainty. You might be amazed by how many financing deals actually fall apart at the last minute. Speed Of FundingAll finance raising exercises will take some time as a lender or investor will have a process they will wish to go through to assess the proposal before handing over any cash. This can range from a few days for a commercial bridging loan to three or four months for a venture capital investment. So you need to be looking forward to see what your requirements will be and to put applications in motion, allowing sufficient time for these to be completed before the need arrives. Costs Of FundingHow much is your finance going to cost you?However, there has been a recent development where the HM Revenue & Customs has noticed that many venture capital investments were making a large part of the investment by way of debt (carrying tax deductible interest) rather than shares (requiring dividend payments from after tax profits). The Revenue has argued that this was an abuse of the rules and has therefore introduced a rule that where debt is provided by the main funder of a business, then the interest may not be tax deducible. The problem with this is that the rules at the time of writing seem quite unclear, for example if most of your funding comes from a bank overdraft, does this mean they are your main funder and therefore the interest is not tax deductible?
The practical position seems to be that for most purposes interest will continue to be deductible, but if you are contemplating obtaining an investment from a venture capitalist which may come as both debt and equity you will need to take appropriate tax advice.
On the other side of the coin, there are various schemes designed to encourage investment in small and medium-sized businesses such as the Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS, see Chapter 12). So if you are seeking investors you can seek to structure the funding required to make it as tax efficient for both sides as possible.
CommunicationFinally you will need to be thinking about how you can go about maintaining the confidence of your lenders or investors. Most institutional lenders or investors will have highly developed early warning systems to spot borrowers or investments that look as though they may be getting into difficulty (after all it is their job to protect their investments or loans). They will be very alive to risk and have an internal credit scoring process with which to assess their portfolio of borrowers or investments, which will then impact on:Having seen some of these matrixes, some of the factors that are used to flag up risk can be very sensitive and are things that the business itself may well not notice or consider particularly important. But you must appreciate that it takes lenders many, many successful accounts earning a few per cent interest over base rate to cover a bad debt that they suffer from a business that goes down. So they will move to starting to try to exit from a relationship far sooner than most businesses ever realise.
So you will need to expend time and effort in communicating with your suppliers of outside cash, be they bankers or venture capitalists. In short you will need to manage your bank manager.
Debt Or Equity Source?As will be covered in detail in Section B, the question of whether your business's cash requirements can be met by borrowing, and if so from which source, or whether you require an equity investment, will generally come down to the question of the available security. Whilst it is a bit crude, the flowchart in Figure 5 provides a rough and ready guide to the likely answer to this question.Fig. 5.
Flowchart for debt v equity source.
Having covered the key issues the next section will look in more detail at the three broad streams of external finance available:
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This is done, usually, only by the company that issued the shares.
Issued Shares Authorized Shares = Issued Shares (sold to investors) + Unissued Shares Issued Shares = Outstanding Stock (held by investors) + Treasury Stock (stock bought back by company)
A share can be defined as an asset that belongs to an individual or a group of people. The various types of shares that can be issued by a company are Authorized and issued shares. Authorized shares are the ones that a company is allowed to issue while issued shares are the shares that are allocated to shareholders.
types of bonus shares
When shares are issued at value which is more than face value then it is called shares issued at premium.
Fully paid shares means that the amount of which shares are fully paid by the investors while shares issued at discount means, share are issued at discounted price from actual face value of asset.
Issued shares(I) are shares of stock that have been sold to investors. It includes both outstanding shares(O) and Treasury shares(T). Thus, I = O+T Outstanding shares(O) are shares of stock currently owned by the shareholders.
One billion shares
Issued Shares: The number of shares that has ever been sold to and held by the shareholders of a company. Includes stock that has been repurchased by the company. Does NOT include shares that have been retired.Outstanding Shares: Stock currently held by investors. Does NOT include stock that has been repurchased by the company..If either no shares have ever been repurchased or if all repurchased shares have been retired then Outstanding shares = Issued Shares.
When shares are issued at price which is more than face value then issuance of shares is called issued at premium and that excess amount above face value is called share premium.
10%
Forefiture of shares issued at par:-Share capital A/c Dr.To share allotment A/cTo Share Call A/cTo share forfeiture A/c(Forfeiture of shares issued at par)