First 4 Recruitment
ABOUT First 4 Recruitment
First 4 Recruitment is in demand for its ability to meet client demands for reliable staff, and for its personal touch with candidates. Invoice financing with Accelerated Payments has let First 4 say ‘yes’ to client requests for personnel, confident that the short-term finance they need is always in place.THEIR CHALLENGE
First 4 Recruitment fills an important niche in the recruitment industry, supplying staff to the industrial, logistics, construction, & commercial sectors. This often involves high-volume recruitment requests from clients in particular to large warehouses who need to book dozens or even hundreds of temporary staff at any one time, however the agency needs to pay its people weekly and sometimes clients may take up to 60 days to settle invoices. In the past, this led to a significant cashflow shortfall, sometimes in excess of over £120,000 while they waited for settlement.“We realised, after trying to cover that gap ourselves, that it was actually holding us back from saying yes to client requests: we needed a financing solution that would let us meet high-volume contracts, confident that cashflow wouldn’t be an issue,” said company Director Samba Hall. “Accelerated Payments was the most cost-effective option in the market, and the only one that gave us exactly what we wanted. We put only selected invoices through financing, and we continue managing our client relationships ourselves.”
BENEFIT
- First 4 Recruitment keeps managing its clients and chasing payment directly, so it stays in control of those important relationships
- First 4 Recruitment puts only selected invoices through the Accelerated Payments invoice financing system
- Up to 80% of the value of each outgoing invoice is immediately available as working capital to First 4 Recruitment. Accelerated Payments provides the final balance payments when clients settle the invoices First 4 Recruitment has successfully used the Accelerated Payments system for just shy of a year, and the difference compared to its previous situation is like night and day, Samba says. He adds that Accelerated Payments offers much better rates and terms than other financing solutions – such as personal loans, which can require company directors to offer their own homes as guarantee. He says that the fast turnaround of the Accelerated Payments service allows the business to move quickly when opportunities arise. “At one point, we had a £50,000 limit on our financing facility, and when we explained why we needed more, Accelerated Payments increased that for us within a 24-hour window.”
“Accelerated Payments has helped us to grow: we’ve just had the busiest peak in our company’s history, and we wouldn’t have been able to place the number of temporary candidates we did during the last quarter without them there to help us fund the short-term gap. We know we have their backing, and it’s a huge weight off our shoulders.”
