All organisations, companies and sole traders that process personal data must pay an annual fee to the ICO unless they are exempt. For ‘small’ businesses this is £40 (or £35 if paid by direct debit). Organisations across the business services, construction and finance sectors are among the first to be fined by the ICO for…
Category: Finance
It’s no longer good enough
Last week the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England increased the base interest rate to 0.75%, only the second increase in the past 10 years. One respected commentator said “It takes some considerable stupidity to see a crisis coming and decide to make it worse. But that’s exactly what the Bank of England has…
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…
Are you making the right choices?
The news this week of business failures past, present and possibly future is alarming. Stories of incompetence, ignorance and a lack of information on a huge scale. I was fortunate to have respite from this doom and gloom on Thursday when I attended a masterclass with a very successful entrepreneur whose wisdom would have prevented…
An important lesson for entrepreneurial business owners
This week the news has been dominated by the collapse of Carillion, which will have huge repercussions for not just the staff they employed but also the 30,000 smaller businesses that relied on Carillion for their income and survival. There are a number of lessons entrepreneurial business owners can learn from this debacle that, like…
When will we learn?
Ten years. Is that all? We have short memories. It’s just ten years since the start of the last financial crash that caused banks to go bust and sent others running to governments for support. And let’s be clear it was entirely self-inflicted and avoidable. Too much debt being granted to over-burdened borrowers with too…
The Virtues of Persistence
This week I have been reading a little known Jim Collins book called How the Mighty Fall. Unlike Built to Last, Good to Great and Great by Choice, How the Mighty Fall is a book originally intended as a research paper until, as Collins says, it defied the constrictions of an article’. Written just after…
The death of the tax return?
In March 2015, when George Osborne outlined the new concept of “making tax easier”, he said it would herald the death of the tax return. All the tax information relevant to an individual would be gathered into the taxpayer’s digital tax account, and the annual paper tax return would be consigned to history. This was…
It started in the vegetable garden
Do you recognise this man? He’s my friend Wilf. Wilf and I have never met, but I call him my friend because we’re like two peas in a pod – we both love numbers. It started (for him) in the late 1880s when he was working in his vegetable garden and made an interesting discovery:…
Take time out to review the health of your business
Every now and then it’s important to stand back and, reassess your priorities and remind yourself what running your own business is all about. The end of the year is an ideal time to do this and decide what you want to achieve in the New Year. The starting point is to review the five…