Business.com is in the business of helping small businesses prosper, but it recently has taken an approach more focused on helping small businesses improve their cash flow to survive the COVID-19 pandemic.

Doug Llewellyn, CEO, Business.com

“We are a small business ourselves, so we have a personal relationship with many of our vendors,” says CEO Doug Llewellyn. “As such, we are able to understand their regular billing cadence and adjust our accounts/payable timing to help get them paid more quickly than usual.”

Business.com, which provides online educational materials and peer-networking services designed to help small businesses address various challenges and take advantage of growth opportunities, earns its own revenue by providing advertising services to companies that provide services to small businesses.

Small businesses in the US are $900 billion in receivables

To address the cash-flow challenges small businesses face with the interruption of normal business activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, Business.com has joined other firms in

organizing Paytoday.club as a resource and educational portal intended help small businesses, or companies with fewer than 500 employees, survive the pandemic by more quickly collecting payment from their business clients. The portal notes that, overall, small businesses in the United States are collectively owed more than $900 billion in receivables at any one time, according to a study conducted by research portal PYMNTS.com and Fundbox, a provider of online payment services and a member of Paytoday.club.

Targeting what it figures is $900 billion in uncollected receivables at any one time for U.S. small businesses, Paytoday.club develops and shares marketing and educational materials to encourage companies and government agencies to pay invoices immediately rather than overextended payment terms.

Paytoday.club aims to help businesses of all sizes

Paytoday.club provides marketing and educational materials designed to encourage businesses of all sizes and government agencies to get involved in agreeing to pay invoices instantly and encouraging other organizations to do the same.

Other participating organizations in Paytoday.club include the business referral network Alignable, payroll services firm Gusto, resources portal Small Business Edge, and financial software provider Pulse.

A Fundbox spokesman notes that the Paytoday.club effort is partly modeled on the QuickPay initiative the U.S. Small Business Administration operated in response to the 2008 Great Recession. The QuickPay program, which encouraged companies to pay their invoices within 15 instead of the usual 30 days, resulted in helping small businesses maintain employment, avoid loan delinquencies and pay their own suppliers, according to a 2018 report on the QuickPay program published by Harvard Business School.

Sign up for a complimentary subscription to Digital Commerce 360 B2B News, published 4x/week, covering technology and business trends in the growing B2B ecommerce industry. Contact editor Paul Demery at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @pdemery.

Follow us on LinkedIn and be the first to know when new Digital Commerce 360 B2B News content is published.