Just one in 10 small and medium-sized businesses is using the Personal Property Securities Register, according to a survey by business information company Veda.Veda surveyed SMEs late last year, asking them whether they were using the PPSR database to search for and register security interests. Only 11 per cent said they were.Veda's general manager of commercial and property solutions, Carol Chris, said that when the company surveyed SMEs in 2011, to ask them if they were using the Australian Securities and Investments Commission's register of company charges, 70 per cent said yes.Chris said: "The register has migrated from ASIC to the PPSR and you would have expected that the SMEs would also have moved over, but they haven't."Chris said the government and the professional and financial services industries still had a big job to do to increase awareness of the PPSR in the business community."Large businesses have adapted but SMEs have not," she said.The PPSR, which was launched at the beginning of last year, was designed to create a single national register of property with security interests.More than 20 state and territory registries have migrated their records to the PPSR. These include ASIC's Register of Company Charges, state registers of encumbered vehicles, state bill of sale registers, and state crop and livestock mortgage registers.The biggest risk for SMEs that do not use the PPSR is retention. A company may sell goods on the basis that title does not pass to the buyer until payment is complete. Under the old law the vendor retained title until payment was complete, but under the Personal Property Securities Act the vendor must register its security interest with the PPSR. So now, under the PPSA, if the security interest is not registered and the buyer becomes insolvent the vendor would not have title. The goods would then pass into the hands of the receiver or liquidator.A partner at Gadens Lawyers, Paul Armstrong, said another problem area was companies not properly registering their security interest. Armstrong said some descriptions were so broad they were ineffectual.He said another consequence of the general lack of awareness of the PPSA was that companies did not realise the deadline for registering a security interest had been reduced from 48 to 20 days.