Invoice finance in Edinburgh

The Edinburgh B2B sectors it suits

Invoice finance works for businesses that invoice other businesses and wait to be paid, and Edinburgh has plenty of them. The food and drink cluster in Leith and out at Newbridge supplies restaurants, hotels and retailers on credit terms, and can wait weeks for payment while still needing to buy the next batch of stock. Recruitment and staffing agencies are a classic fit: they place contractors into Edinburgh's large financial-services, tech and public-sector employers and must pay those workers weekly while waiting a month or more for the client to settle. Logistics, wholesale and manufacturing firms around Sighthill and the city's industrial estates carry the same gap between doing the work and getting paid. Even professional and creative agencies billing corporate clients across the New Town and the Exchange district can find large invoices sitting unpaid for months. In all of these, the cash is real but locked up in the sales ledger. Invoice finance unlocks it, which matters most in sectors with tight margins and heavy up-front costs like payroll or stock.

How invoice finance works

There are two main forms. Invoice discounting advances a percentage of each invoice, often the large majority, while you keep collecting payment from your customers yourself, so your clients need not know a funder is involved. Factoring does the same but the funder also runs the credit-control and collections, which can suit a smaller Edinburgh firm without a dedicated finance team. Both can be arranged on the whole ledger or selectively against individual invoices, and some funders offer confidential facilities. The funder advances the bulk of the invoice value up front, then releases the balance, less their fee, once your customer pays. The advance rate and fees depend on your sector, the quality and spread of your customers and how your ledger behaves. A recruitment agency with blue-chip Edinburgh clients and a Leith producer selling to independent restaurants will be assessed differently. We help you understand which structure fits, but the funder sets the advance rate, the fees and the decision, not us.

How CoreFi arranges it

As a broker, our role is to match your Edinburgh business to invoice financiers whose criteria fit your ledger and to present the case clearly. Funders vary a great deal: some prefer recruitment and staffing, some are comfortable with food and drink or wholesale, some want a broad spread of customers while others will consider concentrated ledgers. Because we work across a whole-of-market panel rather than one funder, we can take a Leith producer, a city-centre recruitment agency and a Sighthill wholesaler to different funders in the same process and compare what comes back. We help you pull together the sales ledger information, aged debtor position and customer detail that funders want to see, then explain the offers in plain terms. We do not lend and we do not make the credit decision; the invoice financier assesses your ledger and sets the advance rate, fees and terms. If the facility completes, the funder pays us a commission, so the introduction usually costs you nothing extra.

Frequently asked questions