Small firms owed £850m

Mar 5 2008 by Tony McDonough, Liverpool Daily Post

SMALL and medium sized businesses in the North West will be owed £850m on February 29 due to suppliers or customers failing to pay on time, according to research from Barclays Local Business.

The survey found small businesses in the North West will spend an hour and a half of the extra Leap Year day chasing up late payments – equating on a regional level to nearly 600,000 wasted working hours or 79,600 wasted working days.

More than half (54%) SMEs in the North West experience problems with late payments, with a third of this number (31%) admitting that customers or suppliers failing to pay on time threatened the day-to-day survival of their business.

Around 56% of those surveyed felt they wasted valuable resources chasing debts, while four in ten (41%) of the North West's bosses are currently using their own money to keep their business afloat while they wait on outstanding payments.