Manual Cash Management Costing UK SMEs Billions

U.K. small businesses are losing billions of dollars every year because they aren’t properly managing company cash flow, a new survey finds.

Reports Tuesday (Feb. 14) said U.K. SMEs lose more than $10.2 billion every year, collectively, because they spend so much time managing company finances like invoices, employee expenses and financial forecasting. According to research from Soldo, small business employees spend an average of more than four hours a week managing these types of processes.

“The time and money taken up by day-to-day management of a company’s cash flow is astonishing but not surprising,” said Soldo Founder and CEO Carlo Gualandri in a statement. “If staff were freed up to dedicate their time to the activities that made a big difference to the company, productivity levels would rocket.”

And while researchers found that, as a company grows, so do the difficulties in managing cash flow, the smallest of SMEs, startups, are struggling the most with daily cash management tasks, with 15 percent of startups saying that they found this issue to be an especially difficult challenge.

The research was released by Soldo at the same time the company announced the rollout of Soldo Business, a multi-user expense account for business users to manage corporate spend.

Gualandri noted that this is the first solution of its kind in the U.K.

“I am delighted that Soldo is first to market in the U.K. for a business spending account that offers companies the ability to delegate, control and track company expenses in real time, a service not currently available from traditional banks,” he said. “Soldo Business’ goal is to give companies an easy way to manage daily cash flow alongside their existing banking setup, without substituting their traditional bank. Technology has enabled businesses to simplify many aspects of their day-to-day operations, however, until the launch of Soldo Business, daily cash flow management was still suffering from a lack of innovation.”