Complete news archive
The Chancellor's Budget & Small Business
Business rates
Small businesses can get relief on their business rates. Small businesses that are in properties with a rateable value of less than £6000 will not have to pay any rates for 1 year. Reductions on a sliding scale will also be available for small business owners with rateable values of between £6001 and £12,000 per annum. To find out more, go to: http://www.2010.voa.gov.uk/rli
Time to pay
You may be able to get time to pay your tax bill if you are running a viable business that is struggling. To find out if you can benefit call 0845 302 1435
Slice of the pie
The government intend to provide more work to small business. You can register to see what tenders are up for grabs every month. Go to http://www.supply2.gov.uk
Capital allowances
You will be able to claim more capital allowances. You can off set up to £100k capital expenditure against your profits chargeable to corporation tax. This means you will need to be running a limited company with the means and requirement to purchase fixed assets to benefit.
A fair chance of that business loan!
The state funded Banks, Lloyds and RBS are to be targeted on lending £41 billion to small business. Let's face it though people, you are still going to need a business plan and some funds of your own (so nothing new to get too excited about here). What's more interesting though is the appointment of a new credit adjudicator set up for small businesses. The adjudicator will ensure you are fairly treated when applying for loans. Ask you bank manager for details on this if you are making a loan application for your small business.
Minimum wage up 2.2 %
Finally if you are an employer you should note that the minimum wage will go up in October 2010 to £5.93 per hour. This is only a 2.2% increase so nothing to really gripe about there.
Sun Mar 28 2010 13:59:39
Yum Yum!
A leading sandwich outlet in the United Kingdom recently announced it would open another 600 stores by the end of 2010. Starting a small catering or food business is not the simplest business one could choose and there are some higher than average start up costs involved, mainly surrounding property and the need to ensure your focus and spend is firmly on "location ,location, location" -no change there then, recession or no recession! The real point here is that the major chains rarely spend £millions of pounds expanding (quite literally millions) if the business is not there. So if you do have the means, you like food and you love customer service, it seems that starting a food outlet may just be a no brainer!
Tue Aug 4 2009 17:20:11
£13.16 billion pounds, wow!
Just in the UK alone, it is anticipated that on-line shopping and sales will boom throughout 2009 to over £14.16bn. That's an increase of around 10% up on 2008. Having an e-commerce web site is not as expensive as you might think, so why not grab yourself half an hour; open a bottle of wine, and do some research that might just change your business prospects forever! Take some time out to learn about a couple of things that are under your very nose, such as Google's ad words service along with some other useful business tools at http://www.google.co.uk/services/.
Tue Aug 4 2009 17:23:02
A good bet for small business lending?
A recent meeting of Lloyds TSB shareholders saw support for plans to raise £5.5 billion to shore up the banks balance sheet. In addition, over 95% of shareholders backed the deal to take over HBOS. A takeover of HBOS is expected to create a bank with 146,000 staff and 3,000 branches across the UK. That's a lot of capacity and a lot of lending power!
Top tip
If you have a small business and you cannot raise the finance you need, it might make sense to talk to a lender that is aggressively seeking expansion and market share. If you're struggling to get your existing bank to help, our bet would be to make Lloyds TSB your next stop for a chat!
Sat Nov 22 2008 02:12:02
The wonder of really knowing what your customers want?
The bosses of Woolworths are in talks to sell all of its 815 stores for just £1. The company has seen its sales in decline for some time and debts have been mounting!
A number of people seem to sight the demise of the company as being caused by a severe lack of ability to understand the changing needs and higher standards of consumers over the last decade.
Thought for the day
What can you do right now to make your small business more customer centric, do you really know what your customers want? Do you really know how to present it, market it and package it?
The wonder of woolies may be dead, the wonder of how you can learn from such a catastrophic business failing is something even the smallest one man band can learn from...
Sat Nov 22 2008 02:11:39
