When the Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, said he was making £330bn available to guarantee loans to businesses and “would do whatever it takes” to make sure UK businesses survive the Covid-19 pandemic he was hailed as a Chancellor who understood the problems small businesses would face. Four weeks on and only one in five UK businesses that have…
Category: Accounting
Are you becoming a dinosaur?
I have supported Liverpool FC for a long time. I can remember the heady days of the 70s and 80s when they were European champions. For nearly a generation, between 1975 and 1990, Liverpool were dominant. They won 10 titles in England’s top division. They won the European Cup, which preceded the Champions League, four times…
What’s next for Making Tax Digital?
As you are probably already aware, there will be no further new taxes introduced, or changes to the threshold for VAT in 2020, so the next major change in MTD will not be until 2021 at the earliest. However, there are a couple of points in relation to the VAT process of which businesses should…
Forty years and counting…
I have been a Chartered Accountant for over 40 years; The 1970s, when I qualified, were pretty grim politically and economically with a great deal of industrial unrest. I didn’t care. I’d spent 3 years at University, got the job I wanted, spent another 3 years training as a chartered accountant, got married, bought my…
Looking at the books, you can see a litany of accounting failures.
After my father died I found among his papers a booklet detailing the history of his mother’s family, the Goodliffes, over several generations during the 19th century, during which they built a thriving wholesale grocery business in the Midlands. In one passage it describes how Thomas Goodliffe, my great-grandfather, went on the first escorted tour…
Rewarding failure
I read with interest an article by Prof Adam Leaver of Sheffield University published by Open Democracy recently. For anyone interested in financial reporting and auditing, and why they have failed to prevent corporate greed and business failures it is essential reading. In the article he looks at how Interserve, which has now failed, paid management bonuses…
Anything at all that matters in life only does so as a consequence of its impact on our conscious mind
Have you ever wondered why relatively few entrepreneurial businesses achieve super success? It’s about one in twenty. Not very many. This should be surprising. Napoleon Hill said “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve. There is no shortage of books, articles, websites and research about what makes a successful business…
You may have to start digging deeper
Last week I spent two days, with different clients, analysing and reviewing their management information. In the first case we’d be warned by their monthly management accounts that profitability had slipped in December. As is often the case the reason wasn’t clear from the P/L alone (which is often the case) and we needed to…
Is your business model fit for purpose?
Christmas is over for another year. For many in retail – and the businesses that supply them – it’ll be over for good. HMV has already gone into administration. It won’t be the last retailer to do so. The new year will inevitably bring more gloom to the high street as retailers, whose hopes were…
The financial crisis no one is talking about.
Auditing is not a sexy subject. But in recent years the auditors of our major businesses have let the public down to a staggering extent. Let me start by restating why audits were introduced. In the 19th century, to encourage trade, businesses were allowed to become limited liability companies, meaning that the liability of the…
