2023-10-09 16:00:20
COLCANOPA
For Catherine Guerniou, CEO of La Fenêtrière, a company with 13 employees, the observation is implacable: “We have around 30,000 euros worth of overdue invoices, it’s been a long time since this happened to us. This is around 12% of our monthly turnover. We can clearly sense that cash flow is tightening, while there are fewer construction sites and the costs for businesses, such as energy or property taxes, are heavier. »
Certainly, for this company which operates in the building sector, the new housing crisis does not help anything.
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But other sectors, although in better shape, are also affected. Martin M. (he did not wish to give his name), who owns a small carpentry business, has created custom furniture and decorative elements for a restaurant in the making in the heart of Paris. “They paid us 40% of the total bill,” he laments. The other service providers on the site are in the same situation, the total cost is around 400,000 euros. “When 80,000 euros of cash are missing in a company the size of mine, the situation very quickly becomes complex,” explains the young business manager, who fears having to part ways with two of his employees, out of a team of three people on permanent contracts and two apprentices.
These cases are not isolated. “Even if activity remains rather good, companies, which must now repay loans guaranteed by the State and tax and social arrears accumulated during the Covid-19 period, use payment deadlines as an adjustment variable, not being able to meet their cash flow needs from banks,” explains Denis Le Bossé, president of the collection firm ARC. According to the Observatory of Payment Times, payments in France are made on average in 11.9 days – compared to 10 days on average at the end of 2019, but more than 15 at the height of the health crisis – which puts France among the good students at European level.
Difficulties on business-to-business payment chains
Beneath this average lies, as is often the case, a contrasting situation which pits small and large ones once morest each other. “Payment deadlines in large groups are not improving, often to the detriment of small businesses, who have little choice but to pay on time, at the risk of no longer being delivered,” explains Franck Allali, debt recovery specialist, with two companies to his credit, Cabinet UFER and CTDA Recouvrement. So much oil that does not circulate in the cogs of the economy. “In total, 12 billion euros are in the coffers of large accounts, which make cash on it, while this should go to those of small ones,” summarizes Pierre Pelouzet, business mediator at Bercy.
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