How Fee Funding Can Help Your Business
Seeking professional help is often the best thing we can do to look after ourselves and our businesses. Professional services such as accountants and lawyers can protect our interests much better than we could alone, but many people are tempted to skip it.
This is because help often comes with large invoices. Paying for the time and expertise of highly skilled professionals adds up quickly, which may prevent you from accessing the services you need.
With fee funding, this is no longer an issue. It’s a simple and secure way to break your bills down into more manageable repayments, and that’s good news for you and your lawyer. In this article, we’ll explore fee funding in more detail and see how it helps firms and clients alike.
What are Fee Funding Services?
Have you ever needed the support of a professional (such as a lawyer or accountant), but you were worried about the size of the invoice? That’s not a concern with fee funding services!
Fee funding is a type of short term loan that clients can use to pay their bills. Most fee funding services are catered towards lawyers, accountants, and other professional services. But you can also find funding for education and other sectors.
When a client receives their invoice, they can use fee funding to pay for it. The invoice is paid upfront and in full under this arrangement, and then the client makes repayments over a short period of time (typically less than 12 months).
How Fee Funding Benefits Businesses
Professional service providers can offer fee funding as an alternative payment option to their customers. This offers 5 major benefits to your business:
1. Improved Cash Flow
One of the major challenges of running a professional services firm is getting paid on time. When you generate large invoices, clients often require additional time to pay the full sum – in some cases, clients may even need payment plans to help meet their obligations.
Fee funding helps navigate around this issue by paying your invoice upfront.
This means you’ll always have the cash you need to run the business, pay employees, expand your services, and operate as normal.
2. Opportunities to Grow the Business
The biggest benefit of fee funding is that it gives you the cash you need to grow your business. A steady cash flow allows you to cover your expenses, but it also makes room for marketing, exploring new services and markets, and expanding to new locations.
This makes it easier than ever to reach new customers and expand your service offering!
3. Service a Diverse Range of Clients
The more clients you can service, the easier it becomes to grow your brand. This is often a challenge in industries where the cost of services can exclude large numbers of customers.
Providing fee funding as one of your payment options is an easy way to expand your client base. Fee funding makes your services more accessible for everyone, not just the people who can afford you upfront.
Growing your customer base provides greater opportunities to expand your business. And it comes at no risk to you – the fee funding provider is the one carrying the risk of short-term loans, so there’s nothing for you to worry about!
4. Improve Client Relationships
Maintaining strong client relationships is the best way to grow your business. Acquiring new customers is one of the most costly parts of doing business, so the longer you can hold onto your clients, the better.
But bill shock is a real issue. If you are handing down large invoices, client relationships can take a hit. This leaves clients less inclined to pay invoices in full and on time, and it may cause them to go elsewhere in the future.
By offering free funding as a payment option, you are greatly improving your chance of building strong client relationships. This increases word-of-mouth referrals, repeat business and helps to further improve cash flow and revenue.
5. No Cost to the firm
All of the above sounds pretty good, but it gets better – fee funding services are typically provided at no cost to the firm.
Because fee funding is a type of short-term loan, clients will end up paying a range of fees and interest charges. However, there’s no cost to the firm, so there’s nothing stopping you from taking advantage of the system.
In many cases, fee funding services set up a dedicated payment portal for your business. This means clients will simply see another way to pay their bill, rather than a third party service.
How Fee Funding Benefits Clients
Fee funding services are an indispensable tool for professional services firms. But these services are also useful for clients, because it allows them to access professional help whenever they need support.
Paying your bills with fee funding makes it simple to manage your own money. When you can’t afford to pay an invoice in full, you can use fee funding to break the repayments down into more manageable pieces. That helps you control your monthly budget, and it means you don’t have to compromise when you need professional support.
Pranab Bhandari is an Editor of the Financial Blog “Financebuzz”. Apart from writing informative financial articles for his blog, he is a regular contributor to many national and international publications namely Tweak Your Biz, Growth Rocks ETC.