Monthly Archives: November 2020

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When and where to apply for the new 80% self-employed grant

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Originally written by Timothy Adler on Small Business
Rishi Sunak has announced that the third self-employed income support grant covering November to January will increase to 80 per cent of profits.
The next self-employed grant will be capped at £7,500 per person, based on average trading profits.
The online service for the next self-employed grant will be available from November 30 through the GOV.UK website.
>See also: Self-employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS) to be doubled for November
The self-employed grant is taxable income and also subject to National Insurance contributions.
The government has already announced there will be a fourth grant covering February to April 2021, the level of which has yet to be announced.
Universal Credit U-turn
The government has also extended the suspension of the Minimum Income Floor, a rule within the universal credit system which capped payments to self-employed workers to the equivalent of what you’re given if you are working full-time on minimum wage but still claiming.
The Treasury said that the cost of support for the self-employed would be up to £7.3bn, £2.8bn of which was new money announced for the third self-employed grant.
Who’s still excluded from the self-employed grant
However, swathes of the self-employed – calculated to be 690,000 people – are still excluded

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Hot Business News Today

Call for digital adoption fund to boost small business productivity

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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

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