Running a business is hard. A lot of SMEs right now are running on the same unspoken strategy: get through this month, then the next one, then figure out the rest. That’s understandable. But survival mode has a ceiling. Stay in it long enough and it stops being a response to difficult conditions and starts … [Read more…]
Customers are the lifeblood of any business, so it’s vital you can keep generating leads and retaining your existing customers. But doing so is often a concern for businesses, with more than one in three companies saying that generating new business is their biggest worry. We spoke to two small business owners and asked them … [Read more…]
As any business owner or HR professional knows, UK employment law doesn’t stand still. The Employment Rights Act 2025 is the perfect example of how quickly legislation can change and how businesses need to adapt to stay compliant. The admin burden of staying compliant is real. Most business owners didn’t start their company to become … [Read more…]
Growth is a tricky business. Companies must continuously strive to identify new growth opportunities to achieve long-term business success. That’s why it is essential for your business to develop fresh insights that will ultimately help to generate ideas that the competition has failed to see. This fascinating subject is what we cover in this article, … [Read more…]
The Employment Rights Act 2025 has introduced a number of changes for UK businesses, including a new statutory duty to keep holiday and holiday pay records for a minimum of six years, what this article calls the ‘six-year records rule’, which came into effect on 6 April 2026. The newly launched Fair Work Agency (FWA) … [Read more…]
Finance teams can take nearly three months per year to close the books—time that you could better spend on strategic decision-making. AP automation eliminates manual workloads, optimises cash flow, and minimises financial risk, allowing you to focus on what truly matters: driving business growth. By automating the financial close, our Close the Books research says … [Read more…]
Performance reviews take more out of managers than most businesses realise. Pulling together months of notes, writing fair and specific feedback for a whole team, getting the tone right for difficult conversations… It’s a lot of work and it all lands at once. AI doesn’t fix the conversation, but it can take most of that … [Read more…]
You may have several departments steering your company towards a bright future. Some deal with the product offering, some with staffing, others with marketing. Let’s see where your finance team’s fiscal expertise fits into the overall game plan. There’s an argument that all budgeting is strategic because it always involves scenario-based planning and allocation of … [Read more…]
A professional employer organisation (PEO) can be a lifesaver for managing HR, payroll and other employee admin tasks. For smaller businesses or organisations that are just starting out, being able to outsource these complex and time-consuming tasks can bring many benefits, including managing and reducing risk. HR can be fraught with potential pitfalls, from handling … [Read more…]
Sam Jones’s Dragons’ Den start-up pitch is immortalised as the TV show’s “best ever”, and Harry Redknapp describes him as having the work rate of a top footballer. In this episode of Sound Advice, Jones revealed his first-hand experience with how to fund a start-up, including how he convinced stars such as Tinie Tempah to invest in his tech start-up, Gener8, a web browser that … [Read more…]