How You Can Benefit From Invoice Discounting?

Invoice Discounting Benefits

Invoice discounting is a finance facility that allows a company to meet their day to day recurring expenses. It solves the cash flow problem of the company. A company needs cash to execute their day to day activities. Invoice discounting is a type of invoice financing. It is a source of short term borrowing to meet the liquidity needs of a company. In invoice discounting the company uses an unpaid invoice or unpaid account receivable as collateral for a loan which is an issue by the finance company. The amount of loan is less than the amount of outstanding receivable it might be 95% of the value of account receivable.

Some of the important points to show how a business may benefit from an invoice discounting facility are:

•    Invoice discounting in India make it possible to pay suppliers or creditors due to punctually and its increase their credit worthiness. It helps in improving the reputation of the business. It helps to create and maintain a healthy relationship between the company and the supplier, thus giving more bargaining power to negotiate a better deal with suppliers.

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•    The invoice discounting business uses the unpaid invoice to release cash that is locked in account receivable. Invoice discounting provides immediate cash to help business to meet operating expenses like paying salary to employees and purchase more goods etc.

•    The best thing of invoice discounting is that there is no inventory or asset/movable item as pledge or collateral, In the invoice discounting the company uses the already generated invoice which is still unpaid by its customers. The company uses this unpaid invoice as collateral for receiving advance cash from the lender. Entities which have a huge amount of outstanding receivables can release the blocked funds.


•    Through the invoice discounting facility, entity’s DPO Extension in India, DPO stands Day Payable Outstanding it’s a financial ratio that shows the average time (in days) that a company takes to pay its bills and invoices to its suppliers, vendors or other creditors. This ratio indicates how well company cash outflow is managed.

•    Some clients ignore or delay in dealing when they realize their supplier is facing financial difficulties in business. This may affect the relationship and more chances of losing deals and contracts. In Invoice Financing in India client will know that company are using invoice as short-term finance facility but Invoice discounting allows business to arrange cash without their client's knowledge, that allows business to maintain their relationships with clients.

•    Invoice discounting is the best source to increase and improve working capital in India. Invoice discounting will help to maintain sale ledger, payment chasing, and invoice processing.

 •    Sometimes a business that is facing cash flow problems, and not able to pay its suppliers and that may result a shortage in business’s Inventory. In this situation, the company may continue placing orders to the existing customer but at the same time not able to fulfill or place new orders. Since invoice discounting provides immediate cash flow, the company will be able to pay suppliers and replenish its depleted inventory.

•    With the bill discounting in India, an entity basically handovers account receivable to the finance company. The invoice discounting doesn’t have any team and condition regarding a certain amount of account receivables. And invoice factoring can cost 0.5% up to 5% in fees this calculation is against the value of account receivables, in addition, some other fees also involve originating the loan. In contrast, invoice discounting usually between 1.5% to 2.5% fees without any additional fees.

Cash Discount Vs Credit Card Surcharges

Source: Google

The use of credit cards has become quite common these days. In fact, we ourselves must have swiped a credit card many times for purchasing any of our favorite products. They have become an easy mode of finance for buying consumer electronics and other items through e-commerce these days, all the top E-commerce websites like Flipkart, Amazon etc have an easy option of EMI for several products through credit cards. It is more common with the people working in the new age corporates and other reputable MNC's as they are providing the credit card facility complimentary to their employees. As we are getting a credit which means a kind of loan and a loan is incomplete without an interest rate charged by the bank, here the surcharge fee acts as the interest rate which is charged by the bank from the user on every transaction they make through credit cards. Simply explaining it is the extra amount which a user pays on every transaction he makes through a credit card. These charges can go up to 4 %, changing depending upon the different states and their laws.

On the other hand, merchants also follow the practice of cash discount. In this practice, the merchants add an extra service fee to all their items and if a consumer is paying in cash the merchants waive off the service charge and provide it as a discount to the customer. There are several guidelines which the merchants have to follow while using this practice; they have to make the customers aware of this policy through proper informative boards in shops. Also, the receipt that the customer gets must have the service charge mentioned and also be shown in the discount given section. It can also be called a kind invoice discounting for the customers.

Source: Google

Both the practices have their own advantages and disadvantages. CASH DISCOUNT or BILL DISCOUNTING might allure the customers because of the fact that they have to pay less for a product as a benefit of early payment to the merchant. On the other hand some people might get attracted towards the credit card purchase because they might be paying extra but not paying at that point of time, they are buying the product on a kind of short-term loan, they can buy their desired products even when they don't have the cash by paying for it in the near future. It all depends on individuals and prevailing situation some might have the availability of cash and would prefer paying less and some might not have that much cash and would love to pay the extra amount on a credit purchase.