One of the great commercial puzzles is why the unsecured creditors of an apparently healthy business end up only recovering pennies in the pound on their debts and the shareholders get wiped out, if the company files for insolvency. Published accounts The bedrock of credit and investment risk management are the annual accounts published by a company. In days gone
Successful catering business with health revenue Valeside Catering Contracts Limited, a business incorporated in 2002 had been a successful husband and wife catering company, servicing a number of hospices, golf clubs and other corporate clients across the home counties and south east. Post pandemic, the 2021 accounts reported a healthy revenue of £1.4m, pre-tax profit of £97k and a balance
The Covid crisis has taken many accepted truths and thrown them up in the air, like a confetti of commercial confusion. In our first article looking at how credit management has been changed, we focused on some of the basics: interpreting unreliable financial data, how a trio of global financial negatives may have worsened even some of your best-known risks
Credit risk disciplines The Coronavirus crisis has not so much moved the goal posts for credit management professionals as relocated the game to another stadium and changed half the rules. Nothing is what it was, so while the old basic credit risk disciplines remain vital, there is a whole new range of techniques that must be applied. In this mini-series
The Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) has long been a useful weapon in the armoury of business rescue experts, with an infinite flexibility designed to allow solutions to be designed to fit the unique situation of every business with temporary or longer-term issues. Not all CVAs succeed, of course, and there has been concern in recent years about its use to
It is common practice for director/shareholders of owner-managed businesses to take remuneration by way of a low basic salary paid through PAYE, with the remainder being taken as shareholder dividends. This is because dividends typically attract a lower rate of tax (both for the individual and the company) than would be payable as an employee. Yet, although this is common
