Business Advice

Recent months have shown many business owners the value of being able to obtain the right business advice from their accountants (at the right time) !

To draw on our own recent experience – we have been much more involved in providing various types of advice to our clients in recent months on issues which have ranged from explaining how Government schemes work, what NOT to do and where to access HR advice, cashflow issues and how or whether to access third party loan finance etc.

As most of these discussions are not the normal compliance discussions about VAT returns, tax deductibility of expenses, HMRC correspondence etc., then does this fall into the area of ‘business advisory support or ‘business advice’ for clients ?

Many of our discussions with clients since March 2020, have been quite different to the discussions
we were having with them before March, with topics covering issues such as:

1. Urgent (and less urgent) cashflow decisions
2. How to access loan finance and managing (the volume of) financial information required by
   lenders
3. Providing support with applications for Government supported loan finance (MFI etc.)
4. Understanding the availability and use of the Wage subsidy/support scheme(s)
5. Assisting with obtaining advice on specific HR processes i.e. employee contract
   amendments/redundancies etc.
6. Advising on business ‘pivots’ to online selling, and ‘linking’ platforms such as Amazon,
   Shopify etc. with Xero/Quickbooks

Below we discuss the concept of ‘business advice’ and what it is, consider how valuable this is for SME clients AND whether clients should really be having these types of discussions with their accountant more often in normal times !! 

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