SME Finance Statistics Galore

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The year is coming to a close, and that means researchers are crunching the numbers to figure out where small businesses have been, where they are, and where they might be going in 2016.

December just began, but the surveys, indexes and research statistics are pouring in. This week, the data are all about SMEs’ money habits – from expense management, to lending and hiring practices. PYMNTS breaks it down by jurisdiction below.

U.S.

81,000: The number of jobs small businesses added in the U.S. in November, the ADP Small Business Report found. The figure is the only one being released by ADP ahead of the full report’s publishing, slated for next month. Separate statistics released by Paychex and the HIS in their joint Small Business Jobs Index found “modest gains” in small business employment levels across the country, a slight year-over-year decrease between November 2014 and 2015, but an increase compared to October 2015. However, even more information by the CBIZ Small Business Employment Index found that small business owners reduced their hiring practices in November, though researchers acknowledged ADP’s seemingly contradictory findings.

49: The percentage of a corporate money manager’s work week spent solely on transaction processing, according to a study conducted by APQC using data from its Open Standards Benchmarking database. Reports said that this means financial officials are using up the majority of their time paying corporate bills, assuring invoice accuracy, and other general accounting behavior, leaving little time for risk management and decision support. Reducing paperwork, analysts said, and increased automation can help reduce the time spent on manual transaction control.

1.44: The percentage at which small businesses in the U.S. are delinquent on their loans by more than 30 days past due, according to the latest statistics from Thomson Reuters/PayNet Small Business Lending Index. The Index reported a drop in small business borrowing in October, marketing the report’s first year-on-year drop since March 2013.

 

U.K.

1 billion: The dollar amount that U.K. banks lent to small- and medium-sized businesses in Q3 2015, reports said Thursday (Dec. 3). The financing was funneled through the federal Funding for Lending Scheme, and represented a 75 percent increase in the dollar amount of loans issued to SMEs under the FLS compared to the previous quarter. Reports said the spike can be attributed to greater lending efforts by Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, though the Bank of England just renewed its participation in the scheme for an additional two years.

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90: The percentage of SMEs surveyed by Smith & Williamson across the U.K. that said they are considering using alternative financing to fund investment for their businesses. The research was released as analysts pointed to a slight decline in the confidence among U.K. small business owners; 87 percent of those surveyed agreed that the government isn’t doing enough to support their export activities.

85: The percentage of employees that admitted to lying on an expense report in the U.K., according to a Webexpenses survey. The firm additionally found that U.K. businesses spend more than $150 million every year because employees are exaggerating on their claims – largely because these companies are still using paper-based T&E systems, researchers noted.

44: The percentage of small and medium-sized businesses in the U.K. that are forced to borrow funds last-minute in order to cover the costs of the peak holiday season. IGF Invoice Finance released the data last week, highlighting the cash flow issues for SMEs that will see rising wage and inventory costs as a result of higher sales for Christmas.

 

Australia

3.6 million: The U.S. dollar amount (equal to $5 million AUS) that Australian authorities have established as the maximum amount of funds non-listed public companies can raise through crowdfunding measures. The cap was announced in the federal Corporations Amendment Crowd-sourced Funding Act legislation, which makes alterations to the Corporations Act 2001, and addresses the emerging alternative lending industry in the nation. According to reports, the $5 million cap will still require these businesses to meet turnover and assets tests.

 

Global

$390: The dollar amount that U.S. employees each leave to their employers yearly in unclaimed expenses. According to research by enterprise application firm Unit4, that amounts to $9.7 billion in non-reimbursed employee expenses every year in the U.S. alone. Employees not claiming expenses from their employers was found to cost nearly $13 billion a year for workers across nine nations in the U.S. and Europe. The top reasons for failing to claim expenses? The expense was too low of value, or employees simply forgot.

[bctt tweet=”$390: The dollar amount that U.S. employees each leave in unclaimed expenses”]

30: The percentage of businesses across the globe that are using mobile banking services to conduct financial transactions, research from Kaspersky Lab and B2B International found. A deeper look into this behavior reveals that the majority of these mobile banking users are employees within corporate finance departments (63 percent), though more than half (54 percent) are general managers, and even 8 percent are employees. Kaspersky took the data as a chance to highlight the growing cybersecurity risk for corporates, as hackers are increasingly targeting mobile platforms, the researchers said.

 

To Recap…

The stats are a bit muddled when it comes to U.S. small business hiring activity, but the consensus seems to be that things are not where SME owners would ideally like them to be – especially at such a lucrative time as the holidays.

U.K. small businesses are struggling, too. As the saying goes, you have to spend money to make money, and British SMEs are feeling the heat from an influx of wage and inventory management costs coming from the holiday rush.

SMEs everywhere appear to be more closely eyeing lending operations. While small business lending demand declined slightly in the U.S., SME financing, both traditional and alternative, are increasing across much of the rest of the globe.

Finally, with all of this account balancing to do, businesses are revealing new trends in their expense management. Corporate finance professionals are spending nearly half of their time just making sure invoices are correct and suppliers are getting paid. And when it comes to employee expenses, the latest stats find that employees are losing money by not pursuing reimbursement from their companies – but that companies are also losing money as employees exaggerate their expense report claims.

With 2015 quickly running out of time, we expect the data deluge to continue throughout the rest of the month.