All Money talk articles – Page 4
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News
Money Talk: Forecourt hourly pay rates rise to £6.67
As regular readers will be aware, each autumn we look at the hourly pay rates of thousands of staff working at hundreds of forecourts around the country, to obtain a picture of real pay rates in the petrol retail industry. The data comes from actual pay slips (over 5,300 of ...
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Money Talk: Diesel blues for some and bad apples for others
It happened in August. Motorists suddenly found pump prices of diesel were falling more steeply than those of unleaded. By the end of the month the unthinkable had happened on many forecourts diesel was actually cheaper than petrol. For some of the millions of today’s diesel drivers this felt like ...
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Money Talk: Heads in the cloud over the cost of accounting
There’s a scenario that often plays out when we first meet a prospective new retail operator: after the usual exchange of pleasantries we listen to their plans for their new business; funding it, staffing and operating it. Eventually the conversation touches on their ’accounting’ expectations. Nine times out of 10 ...
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Money Talk: Mr Osborne’s very unwelcome surprises
George Osborne presented his first proper Tory Budget on July 8 and, while it left many things unchanged from the earlier March version, there were some announcements that did take commentators particularly various employers’ and business organisations by surprise. Probably the biggest of these surprises, and one that naturally hasn’t ...
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Money Talk: Auto Enrolment - creeping ever closer
We’ve mentioned it before, but make no excuse for highlighting it again: Auto Enrolment is coming your way and you need to be ready for it. We’re talking about the legal responsibility of all employers to provide an appropriate, approved workplace pension scheme for their staff. It doesn’t matter whether ...
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Money Talk: How to help with your business rates revaluation
The latest round of property valuations for business rates purposes is now in full swing. Since early February, the Valuations Office Agency (VOA) has been issuing questionnaires to thousands of businesses across England and Wales, and a similar exercise is happening in Scotland. The information will be used to update ...
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Money Talk: Don’t ignore individual site-operator finances
Hardly a day goes by without the sell-off of yet another tranche of forecourts by a major oil company to one of the numerous independently-owned groups in the UK retail market. Almost inevitably there are the associated recruitment ads by some of these same groups, looking for people to join ...
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Money Talk: Budget 2015 (the March one)
It was always likely to be a strange Budget coming as it did just seven weeks before the General Election which looks highly likely to end without any clear winning majority. The Chancellor had to stand up and deliver a Budget that somehow appealed to his existing voters but didn’t ...
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Money Talk: Why small businesses need accountancy advice
We meet owners of small businesses at many events trade shows, franchise seminars, awards functions and just about anywhere else where business people gather. Being friendly, we speak to them. In oh-so-many instances, our newly-found acquaintance will say something along the lines of: "Mine’s only a small business" or "I ...
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Money Talk: Fuel price crash continues - for now
It’s difficult to avoid using hyperbole when describing the current fall in pump prices: unparalleled is one adjective that springs to mind. Even those of us who’ve been involved in this business for 30 or more years struggle to remember anything quite like it. One old ’grey-beard’ did mention the ...
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Money Talk: We’re now trading in a deflationary universe
It seemed that many consumer spokespersons and media commentators were in a state of glee with each seemingly daily fall in the price of oil in the closing weeks of 2014. At times there was an almost vicious element to some of the pieces; some celebrating the oil industry getting ...
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Money Talk: Are you brave enough to try our end-of-year quiz?
1] Your accounts show total shop turnover for the year as £240,000 at an overall GP% of 19%. But your business plan was based on an expected GP of 23% on sales of £220,000. How far off-target is your gross profit against the business plan? [a] Over by £8,000 [b] ...
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Money Talk: Average forecourt pay rates rise by 1.3%
As we’ve been doing every year since 1998, we’ve once again taken the payroll data that PAYEPeople processes on behalf of hundreds of forecourt operators across the UK to find the real pay rates that were being paid to nearly 6,000 individual hourly-paid employees, giving a true snapshot of what’s ...
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Money Talk: Trust a professional or a family amateur?
There’s a scenario which crops up quite often when we’re talking with people new to running their own business. We’ll be trying to explain something quite well established say, for example, the basic rules covering the treatment of travel expenses in their personal tax returns. Our new client listens for ...
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Money Talk: Counting the cost of handling all that cash
It was interesting to read the feature in July’s edition of FT ’Change on the Cards’, which highlighted the growing frustration of many dealers with fuel cards. As we’ve pointed out on these pages previously, the real problem with the terms under which most retailers work with those cards is ...
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Money Talk: The modern forecourt - is it partially exempt?
Every now and again an issue crops up that highlights the changing nature of petrol retailing. Occasionally it surfaces as a small, apparently isolated query which then seems to spread at a rather unexpected rate. Suddenly we have to look at more than just one or two retailers to check ...
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Money Talk: Accountants don’t bite (unless provoked)
While many people are off enjoying their summer holidays, July and August see many accounting professionals wishing that they could extend theirs indefinitely rather than going back to the office and trying to sort out the latest ’jumble in a shoe box’ that some of their clients hand to them ...
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Money Talk: How to avoid the Take That approach to tax
It happens with almost monotonous regularity another very wealthy celebrity ’outed’ as owing the taxman several million pounds because some exotic ’tax-saving’ scheme for which they’d signed up has been declared illegal. It’s been going on for years, and as sure as night follows day, there’ll be another one soon. ...
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Money Talk: Been here long? If you’re a newcomer... read on
Sometimes it’s easy to forget that at any given time, there are always a few people who are new to this industry in fact, new to being in their own business at all. Of course, there’s some ’churn’ in petrol retailing, as in every other walk of life. People get ...
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Money Talk: Budget measures slip in through the back door
Any readers below the age of say 40 might be amazed to hear that until not so many years ago, ’Budget Day’ was one of the most eagerly anticipated and busiest days in the petrol retailers’ calendar. It was typically preceded by weeks of speculation about how much extra fuel ...