All Money talk articles – Page 5
-
News
Money Talk: Auto Enrolment is on its way to your business
You may have heard of it already, but if you haven’t, we’re talking about pensions. And it will affect you and every other employer in the country. You need to know about the regulations and make sure that you’re ready, since the penalties for failing to do so are quite ...
-
News
Money Talk: Could a fuel retailing revolution be on its way?
T here have been several news stories from the petroleum retailing sector in the past few weeks that at first glance appear unrelated. There was Esso confirming its move towards a wholesale supply mode. Then major supermarket chains admitting that their fuel operations are hurting their bottom line. And now ...
-
News
Money Talk: It’s no time to withhold your financial secrets
January is always a very busy month for accountants, dominated primarily by the need to ensure that clients’ personal self-assessment tax returns (SATRs) all get filed by the 31st at the very latest. Of course, most accountants neither want nor expect to do all the SATR work in the last ...
-
News
Money Talk: ’Tis the season to be wary
The scam email problem is so common that it’s almost become a cliché. You receive an email from some individual in a far-flung country, offering a sizeable chunk of their ’lottery winnings’. All you need to do is give them a bit of help to get the money into the ...
-
News
Money Talk: Latest forecourt hourly pay rates revealed
There are several ways of trying to establish average pay rates in an industry or area. You can ask employers what they pay their staff; you can ask employees what they receive. Or you can do what we’ve been doing every year since 1998 examine the payroll data that PAYEPeople ...
-
News
Money Talk: Big Brother is watching you, now more than ever
Think back just a few months to the global news story about US and UK electronic snooping on email and other internet traffic. The revelations at least served to illustrate just how vast the data capture and information processing abilities of government agencies have become. Of course, there were the ...
-
News
Money Talk: Card merchant fees are not the real issue
It’s been a little odd to watch the whole card processing cost saga increasingly dominate the news pages in Forecourt Trader over the past few months. At EKW (and particularly through this column), we have been pointing out the effect of retail percentage merchant fees on rising fuel prices for ...
-
News
Money Talk: Being limited... part two
When you trade as a sole trader or as part of a partnership, strictly speaking you do not have to prepare or send a copy of your business accounts anywhere! That may surprise some operators who’ve always assumed that they were paying their accountants to do just that, and we’d ...
-
News
Money Talk: Limited knowledge of running a company
As accountants specialising in several retail sectors (forecourt, convenience, hospitality and even opticians’ practices) we’re involved in a great many new business start-ups. In recent years, a large proportion of these new businesses have come under the generic heading of franchises, and it’s quite routine for franchise-type businesses to be ...
-
News
Money Talk: A very thin line between trading and disaster
Readers who occasionally watch any of the documentary channels on TV might be familiar with the warnings that our highly-automated and interlinked society is really rather fragile. One large solar flare or a heavy ice-storm, and power supplies and communications links suddenly fail, bringing normal activities to a grinding halt. ...
-
News
Money Talk: Whatever happened to our ’flexible friend’?
Every retailer reading Jac Roper’s page in last month’s issue should have been horrified by the prospect of a major electronic funds transfer (EFT) processor changing their debit card handling fees from a ’per transaction’ cost to a percentage of turnover. That’s because this was an attack on one of ...
-
News
Money Talk: Budget 2013: did you even notice it?
After what went down in history as the ’omnishambles Budget’ of 2012, the contents of which had been leaked in advance all over the media only to be embarrassingly reversed in the following few weeks, this year’s effort was at least kept pretty closely guarded right up to March 20. ...
-
News
Money Talk: Don’t automatically think you’re ready for Real Time
This April will usher in a major change affecting all employers in respect of how they provide employee, pay and deductions information to HMRC. Forget ’once-a-year’ payroll reconciliations: from April 6 onwards, employers will need to supply information to HMRC each time they pay their staff either before, or on, ...
-
News
Money Talk: Outstanding campaign from the VAT office
It sounds almost friendly doesn’t it? No hint of a threat of any big investigation into your financial affairs, or any penalties. But don’t be complacent about it. For all of the soft PR in which this campaign’s been cloaked, there’s still an iron fist within the velvet glove, and ...
-
News
Money Talk: Pantomime season is extended to September
At almost the last minute, the government cancelled this month’s intended rise in fuel duty. The pressure groups and special interest lobbies claimed a victory; George Osborne looks like a politician who’s listening to ’the people’; the petrol retail industry avoids another rise in costs; and consumers avoid another hammering ...
-
News
Money Talk: Forecourt pay rates rose 1.1% to September 2012
There are several ways of trying to establish ’average’ pay rates in an industry or area. You can ask employers what they pay their staff or you can ask employees what they receive. Or you can do what we’ve been doing every year since 1998 examine the payroll data that ...
-
News
Money Talk: Beware hype, spin and selective statistics
You’ve read the headlines: ’Fuel sales plummet by 500 million litres’ and the like, based on figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Naturally these headlines have prompted the inevitable cries of doom from the usual suspects, to the effect that it’s all down to fuel pricing ...
-
News
Money Talk: Don’t expect the OFT to solve all your problems
No doubt many of you will have been pleased by two recent pieces of news the Office of Fair Trading’s announcement of another investigation into UK retail fuel pricing, and the Energy Minister’s pledge to refer the workings of the international fuel price mechanisms to the Financial Services Authority. ...
-
News
Money Talk: Find out why you spend so much time in the red
This subject just won’t go away it’s a discussion that takes place on so many forecourts when dealers receive their latest management accounts: "You’re telling me that my business is profitable, but I never have any cash, and my bank account is always overdrawn. One of us must be getting ...
-
News
Money Talk: Making business bank accounts work for you
The banks have taken quite a kicking in the past few years but one has to feel sympathy for the hard-pressed customer-facing staff working in the High Street branches. Their numbers culled annually in the cause of ’efficiency’, they’ve had to take the brunt of customer complaints about policies and ...