Your Business Plan
Anna Stubbs • March 1, 2024
An ever-changing business landscape can present unforeseen challenges for any business at any time. Identifying risks and opportunities in your business model and creating a Business Plan will help you prepare for difficulties or adversities and provide clarity in the event of a crisis in the future.
Now is an ideal time to document a clear Business Plan:
- Defining what you, as business owners, want from the business; this includes cash drawings, your role, hours of work and holidays.
- Establishing your budget to ensure you’re generating enough cash to cover all expenses including tax, personal expenses, loans and asset purchases.
- Determining your critical KPIs; the most important things you need to measure to track your progress towards achieving your targets.
- Identifying your opportunities and vulnerabilities; the factors that will most impact your business recovery.
- Determining how to manage your most critical challenges.
- Establishing your 12-month and 90-day goals to ensure you’re clear on your priorities.
- Clarifying your actions to achieve those goals.
If you haven’t created a Business Plan, we can facilitate this. You’ve got the smarts on your business, what’s working and what might need to change. Our expertise lies in stress testing the numbers and pulling everything into one concise plan of attack – so if the unexpected happens, you’re prepared. Contact us today.
Hiding in the HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) announcements published on 26 March was a technical note entitled ‘Modernising the tax system through Making Tax Digital‘. This note announces that the income threshold for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax & Self Assessment (or MTD for ITSA) is to drop to £20,000 per annum for sole traders and landlords. If you fall into this category, this means moving your tax completely over to digital by April 2026. But don’t worry, let’s see what MTD for ITSA is all about.
Uncertainty can be a major threat to your strategic financial planning. Being unsure of what lies around the corner makes it difficult to make those important financial decisions around operational budgets, investment and growth funding. But by using forecasting and scenario-planning, you make it easier to manage your finances and reduce some of the financial uncertainty.
Some great new enhancements have come to Xero in the first few months of the year, here's some important features that have been released: Enhancements to the new invoicing Keyboard shortcuts. Drag and drop attachments. Date Picker quick select. Exchange rate adjustments in the invoice. Tracking categories for invoices. Automated bill entry The ability to upload bills directly to Xero, create one or many bills by dragging and dropping multiple files. Xero creates draft bills with the key details, and the original document is attached. Other important features (region dependent) Bank feed updates (Australia adds Suncorp Bank, United States gains PNC Commercial). Simplified whole operations with improved sales orders (United States). Easier 1099 reporting and filing (United States). Streamlined tax workflow and compliance (United Kingdom). Easier reporting (United States Schedule C compliance report, New Zealand not-for-profit tier 3 & 4 PBE reports). For the full breakdown read Xero's update .