All Money talk articles – Page 2
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NewsMoney Talk: Were you aware that Minimum Wage Rates have risen again?
Being very busy people, you may have missed the fact that on April 1, the National Minimum Wage/Living Wage rates were raised again. For the record, the rates that you should now be paying are: Age 25 & Over £8.21/hr 4.9%from £7.83 Age 21-24 £7.70/hr 4.3%from £7.38 Age 18-20 £6.15/hr ...
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Money Talk: VAT returns are changing very soon: is your business prepared?
You may have heard the phrase Making Tax Digital (MTD) a few times in the last couple of years. Admittedly not the catchiest of terms, so far it hasn’t had much impact outside the accounting journals in fact it’s hardly caused much in the way of comment even in the ...
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Money Talk: Don’t worry, it’s only the auditors and they offer genuine benefits
A year on from the meltdown at Carillion, quite apart from the immense fallout in practical terms, one consequence is that serious questions have been raised about the role of that company’s auditors. The same questions have arisen after almost every subsequent corporate failure the latest being at Patisserie Valerie, ...
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Money Talk: Honesty is always the best policy, especially when it comes to HMRC
There’s a saying that there are two people with whom you should always be completely open and honest: your doctor and your lawyer. Of course, we’d add accountant to that select number particularly at this time of year. That’s because while much of the business world seems to go into ...
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Money Talk: We’ve had a rare outbreak of common sense...
At a time when the main news channels seem permanently occupied with the political quagmire around Brexit, it’s tempting to believe that everything else in business and politics is in a state of paralysis and terminal decline. That may of course still be the case, but at least two recent ...
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Money Talk: Data, information - or what we call the ’Bigger Picture’
Petrol retailing is fundamentally a high-turnover, low-margin business. It isn’t unique in that respect, of course, but it is somewhat unusual in that the major component of that turnover (fuel in case anyone has forgotten) is subject to almost daily price volatility and in the short term that includes the ...
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Money Talk: How an unrelated business on your premises could still affect yours
There are two topics which never seem to go away as far as the forecourt retailing industry is concerned: fuel prices and hand car washes; and certainly both receive regular coverage within Forecourt Trader in general and within this column in particular. With hand car washes, the problem relates to ...
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Money Talk: Decision time - should you stay with your oil co or should you switch?
Every five years or so, every independent dealer faces what is perhaps their biggest business decision: whether to renew a supply deal with their existing oil company or take a big gamble and change suppliers. But today there’s often now a third option that comes up: put the site up ...
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Money Talk: Why it’s hard accounting for the unexpected
Spare a moment for some sympathy for the BP dealers who’ve had two rather unfortunate experiences related to plastic money in recent months. First, at the end of May, many of them discovered that they owed the oil company significant amounts of money for Allstar card-handling charges over the previous ...
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Money Talk: Holiday times can be stressful... so planning is vital
There are two periods in the year when odd things tend to happen around some smaller businesses and that includes most forecourts. Both are holiday times: one is the extended Christmas/New Year break, and the other is the height of summer; from around now until the end of August. One ...
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Money Talk: The knock-on effects of the continuing rise in pump prices
It’s around six years since pump prices were last at present levels and, if anything, they’re likely to rise higher this year than they did then. At the time of writing, regular diesel was nudging 130ppl at many urban sites, while some motorway service areas were already displaying prices closer ...
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Money Talk: High Street in crisis? What does it means for forecourts?
It seems that you can’t listen to a news bulletin at the moment without hearing about yet another High Street retailer or restaurant chain either closing completely or undertaking some form of re-structuring which inevitably involves closing a significant number of outlets and losing hundreds or thousands of jobs. Some ...
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Money Talk: Time to talk pensions as not even you can work forever
If you’ve been running your own business and employing staff for more than a couple of years, you’ll no doubt remember all of the publicity about Pensions Auto Enrolment. How between 2012 and 2017 every employer, down to the smallest, was repeatedly reminded to ensure that they had a recognised ...
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Money Talk: Doing it yourself isn’t always the better option for business
Recent events have given the concept of ’outsourcing’ rather a bad press, albeit that many of the arguments are about politics rather than business. From the media coverage of the Carillion failure you might get the impression that everyone should go back to some (perhaps mythical) golden age where organisations ...
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Money Talk: Following the demise of P&H, is it back to the cash and carry?
For anyone involved in forecourt retailing over the years, the news of Palmer & Harvey’s collapse late last November is likely to have been more than a shock more like the end of an era. Unless you’re old enough to have worked in this industry for longer than say 20 ...
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Money talk: Blink and you missed it: the 2017 (Autumn) Budget
In the last days before the Budget there had been speculation regarding a specific hit on diesel users with some people suggesting a possible increase in fuel duty on diesel of as much as 2-3ppl which was quite alarming to both the haulage industry and millions of ordinary punters, since ...
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Money Talk: Deposit Return Schemes - green values or just more red tape?
Depending on your politics possibly the most interesting topic to have emerged from this autumn’s round of party-political conferences was the discussion regarding proposals for the introduction of some type of Deposit Return Scheme (DRS) on sales of various bottled or packaged products. It was interesting not least because the ...
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Money Talk: Renting out all or part of your site? Stop and consider this...
Visit many forecourts today and you’re likely to come across a familiar sight: parts of the premises sub-let to smaller ’independent’ businesses renting some space from the owner to carry out their own activities. The most common, of course, is the hand car wash. In other cases it may be ...
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Money Talk: Make sure you’re really paying the National Minimum Wage
The embarrassment must be a PR person’s nightmare. Imagine: you represent a very large national retailer; one that continually advertises on TV, radio and in magazines and newspapers. Then comes the press release from HM Government across all the news media your client has just been included in the latest ...
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Money Talk: When it comes to sub-letting, it’s usually ’see no evil, hear no evil’
In common with many other sectors of the economy, the petrol retailing industry has seen a quiet, persistent, trend over the past couple of decades: call it ’out-sourcing’, or ’contractingout’, or just ’sub-letting’. The owner of a business or premises feels that some activity isn’t producing the financial returns that ...