The Pros And Cons Of Trade Credit

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We often hear that companies that sell their product allow their customer to enjoy the goods before full settlement is being made. This best explains the definition of trade credit where the customer gets their products and the payment is postponed to a later date. According to Murray (2008), it is a term where the buyers buy now and pay later. In order to accomplish various business objectives, many forms of trade credit are used to achieve collaboration of business to make the usage of capital more efficient. Nowadays, people tend to rely more on trade credit rather than getting loans to finance their business. Peavler (2014) mentioned that small businesses might only have trade credit as their financing method and researches has shown that more than 40 percent of their financing comes from trade credit.

Nowadays, most companies who provide trade credit face is the lack of cash flow in the environment. Based on a statement made by Selko (2008), the trade credit market now are facing the problem where the companies are unable to pay their liabilities that are due because there is insufficient cash flow. It is hard for the business to possibly collect back their money when the cash flow is lacking in the environment. The degree of ability for them to collect back the debt would be so low. There are even chances where they are unable to collect the debt. According to Trade Credit Insurance (2014) the cash flow issues will cause a major loss in revenue for most firms. There would also be currency risk where the currency would have fluctuated during the time lapse. Credit policies are developed to overcome these problems by providing guidelines for both parties to follow before conducting business. Budde (2013) stated that it is a ...

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...enient credit policy will leads to high amount of borrowing and in cases where full collections are made will increase the profits of the company. She added that a stringent or static credit policy would only minimizes cost and losses from bad debts but might reduce revenue, profitability and cash flow of the company. Also, the company will lose competitive edge and this will eventually has a massive impact on the profitability of the company when the company has fewer customers. Hence, a static credit policy is not suitable for every company especially companies that are still relatively small.
In a nutshell, the credit policies in many ways can help the company to increase its performance. When the performance is enhanced, automatically it will help the company to increase their profitability through increased sales, reduced the amount of bad debt and many more.

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