Tag Archive for SMEs

Call for digital adoption fund to boost small business productivity

Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Tech start-ups have called for a digital adoption fund to help small businesses upgrade to digital technology.
Adopting digital technology has long been seen as key for the UK to boost its woeful productivity levels.
One in three small businesses – those with fewer than 250 employees – cite cost as the biggest barrier to them adopting digital tech, whether it’s video conferencing such as Teams or Zoom, customer relationship management software such as Salesforce or enterprise resource planning like Oracle Netsuite.
See also: Best UK small business accounting software 2020 – review guide
The digital adoption fund would be based on Singapore’s “SMEs Go Digital” initiative, which offers grants covering over two thirds of what small businesses spend on digital tech. The proposed UK version of the scheme would cover 70 per cent of what it costs to upgrade capped at £22,500 per company.
The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) report says such a digital adoption fund would close the gap between Britain’s most productive larger companies and the long tail of its unproductive SMEs.
If SMEs were to match the productivity levels of their larger cohorts, it would boost GDP by £92bn.
And if the UK’s 1.1m

Read more...

Call for digital adoption fund to boost small business productivity

Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Tech start-ups have called for a digital adoption fund to help small businesses upgrade to digital technology.
Adopting digital technology has long been seen as key for the UK to boost its woeful productivity levels.
One in three small businesses – those with fewer than 250 employees – cite cost as the biggest barrier to them adopting digital tech, whether it’s video conferencing such as Teams or Zoom, customer relationship management software such as Salesforce or enterprise resource planning like Oracle Netsuite.
See also: Best UK small business accounting software 2020 – review guide
The digital adoption fund would be based on Singapore’s “SMEs Go Digital” initiative, which offers grants covering over two thirds of what small businesses spend on digital tech. The proposed UK version of the scheme would cover 70 per cent of what it costs to upgrade capped at £22,500 per company.
The Coalition for a Digital Economy (Coadec) report says such a digital adoption fund would close the gap between Britain’s most productive larger companies and the long tail of its unproductive SMEs.
If SMEs were to match the productivity levels of their larger cohorts, it would boost GDP by £92bn.
And if the UK’s 1.1m

Read more...

Alternative funding solution to Brexit finance problems for small businesses

Brexit uncertainty is creating divisions of opinions in the small business market as much as in any other sector of the population. But at root there is a consensus that while the situation is far from ideal and clarity is needed, small businesses are essential to the growth of the UK economy. Alternative financers are
The post Alternative funding solution to Brexit finance problems for small businesses appeared first on Small Business.

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Why Making Tax Digital could make a large dent in the UK’s tax gap

The UK has one of the lowest tax gaps in the world, with the latest available figures (covering the 2015-16 financial year) showing a gap of 6 per cent between the amount of tax due and actually collected. When these figures were first announced, HMRC was quick to herald the fact that this gap is
The post Why Making Tax Digital could make a large dent in the UK’s tax gap appeared first on Small Business.

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RBS pledges £1 billion in extra funding to SMEs

The Royal Bank of Scotland will lend an extra £1 billion to small and medium sized enterprises over the next year. Alison Rose, head of commercial and private banking said that SMEs were the lifeblood of the economy and said ‘there is more that can be done to support them.’ RBS was criticised earlier this
The post RBS pledges £1 billion in extra funding to SMEs appeared first on Small Business.

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2017 to be a good year for SMEs that trade internationally

BDRC Continental publishes an update to its half-yearly SME Finance Monitor. The largest and most frequent study of its kind in the UK, research findings date back to the start of 2011 and are based on more than 100,000 interviews with SMEs, showing that 2017 will be a strong year for SMEs. The full report
The post 2017 to be a good year for SMEs that trade internationally appeared first on Small Business.

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