by Greg Carroll at www.attitudefinance.com

When it comes to business finance we tend to focus on the interest rate, but the hidden cost in commercial finance is often the fees.

If your business has an active trading account where you are conducting numerous transactions daily then it doesn't take long to clock up some fairly substantial account keeping and transaction fee. If you are running your account through an overdraft then will also be paying Line Fees which can add up to several thousand dollars a quarter.

There are a number of strategies and products that can be adopted to reduce these costs and improve your cashflow.

A business package that I believe is particularly good is the Small Business Money Manager Package from Suncorp. The package has been designed to provide efficiencies for business banking and considerable savings for both business and personal borrowings.

One of the big pluses of the package is it provides up to 100 free transactions per month on the Small Business Line of Credit. They also have access to other business banking products plus can receive interest rate discounts of up to 0.7% plus waiving of fees personal residential borrowings and transactional banking.

To access the package there is an initial establishment fee of $800 plus a $500 annual fee paid in advance.

So for example let's say you have a Business Overdraft of $300,000 and are passing through 100 transactions a month at an average cost of $0.50 per transaction plus paying a quarterly line fee of $900. This equates to $4,200.

Compare that to an annual fee of $500 and that's a fairly big saving. That's like reducing your interest rate by around 1.20%.

There are numerous ways to improve both your business and personal cashflow. Contact us if you would like an assessment of your options.