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An overlooked pressure affecting many small businesses?

DavidAshdown
Newchodge said:
I have a client who has been a pain since the beginning - their computer skills are close to non-existent and they did not understand what I needed when I explained I needed a timesheet every time I ran payroll (hourly paid staff, paid 4-weekly). So I designed a simple timesheet for them, with rows and columns automatically totalled and a colour code for each type of day - normal, sickness, holiday, unpaid etc. The key for that was repeated on every timesheet.

They struggled with completing the timesheet, making changes so the totals didn't work, entering totals manually, which did not add up properly, etc. I reminded them on the Monday every 4 weeks that I needed the timesheet by lunchtime on Thursday so I could run payroll for them to pay staff on Friday. Every Thursday I chased them for the timesheet. I explained several times that the deadline was 12:00 mid-day on Thursday. I often worked Thursday evening, but often also didn't get the data I needed until Friday, often late Friday so I would work at the weekend so they could pay staff on Monday. Terms were payment 3 periods in advance and I always had to chase it.

Last year I had enough when they complained that the payslips weren't available on Friday morning when the data had been there by 18:00 on Thursday. I explained that my work on their payroll was scheduled for 12:30 on Thursday and if they missed their slot it would be done when I had time. They were amazed by this.

Some months ago I notified them that I would not be providing payroll after end March this year. I chickened out of the real reason and told them new government regs meant It wasn't economically viable. They argued about that saying they weren't aware of the new regs. They asked, last week, for a P45 for someone who left on 2 April (last payroll of the year was 3 April). Their next paydate is 1 May and they haven't found a new provider yet.

What I should have done was recognise the red flags and sack them as a client after the first year, but I hoped it would improve.

Sorry, sometimes, when you work alone, you need a rant!
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No need to apologise, that’s exactly the kind of situation I was thinking about when I wrote the post.

What’s interesting is that everything you describe was visible early on… just not obvious enough at the time to act on decisively.

I think a lot of us fall into that “it’ll improve” mindset, especially when we’ve already invested time and effort.

The difficult bit is knowing when something is a temporary frustration vs a pattern that’s unlikely to change.

Out of interest, looking back, was there a specific moment where you now think “that was the point I should have stepped back”?
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Shopify Cosmetic Store

K
Switching platforms focused tiktok + nano-influencers on beauty gadgets. Month 3 gave me £3,5k/mo profit no marketplace fees eating 15%. Kept my £150/day ebay winners but added 4-5 new hits via video testing. So I did the same jump last year from ebay chaos to sellvia mall, similar dropshipping vibe. Same story shipping delays, , refunds killing margins , one hero listing carrying everything
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Tax and profits question

D
LeeHayler said:
Thank you.. i am not sure which way my accounting is done. But i did briefly have a chat with her colleague today who said that the date will be from the date invoiced which was the 13th March, so all last years ty
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Not sure how you explained the situation to the colleague but if they are using the Invoice date then you must be using the accrual basis.
Yes you use the invoice date but as numbersrule says you must then use prepayments and accruals in the accounts to make sure the invoice reflects correctly for the period that the work relates to.
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Is unpaid leave still legal?

Paulzx
Newchodge said:
Minimum wage relates to hours WORKED. If they don't attend and don't work their entitlement to NMW for that day (or those hours) is precisely £0.00. Or unpaid leave.

The harder part is when they give a mixed message about being ill. If they are ill they have the right to SSP. So you must clarify if they are taking an additional day's paid holiday (to come out of their entitlement), a day's unpaid leave or if they are too ill to work and will get SSP.

They do not have to produce evidence for the first 7 days of sickness absence, other than self certifying (as has been the case for many many years) and you cannot withhold SSP if you suspect the illness is not genuine. You need to use your sickness absence management procedure, which should include action to be taken if someone is off sick the day before or the day after annual leave.

Don't forget it is now a criminal offence not to record all periods of paid holiday and how the holiday pay was calculated.
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Okay so in this case I think it will be unpaid leave, as the employee has come in today asking for it to be unpaid and not citing any kind of illness preventing him coming in. Thanks for clarifying those points, very helpful
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AI does have its uses

Keynote Speech
Imgto3d said:
Interesting discussion. Moving away from coding and text generation for a sec, if look at the broader generative AI, the shift is undeniable

AI image generation tools can now take a fairly generalized, vague prompt and, through occasional bursts of algorithmic "inspiration," produce highly usable assets, AI image-to-image editing is rapidly reaching a point where it's making like Photoshop practically redundant for the average user.

However, AI 3D model generation—specifically in the image-to-3D pipeline—still has a bit of a road ahead. We are still seeing inconsistent outputs resulting in excessively high polygon counts, and the mesh topology definitely still has room for improvement. But realistically? That gap is not huge anymore, and it is shrinking steadily by the day. And of course, the compute and generation costs are only going to keep dropping.

The overarching trend is: if a job merely requires someone to be a basic "tool operator" who applies just a tiny bit of intelligence to execute a mechanical software task, that role is actively being replaced.
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That’s an interesting way of looking at it. It does feel like anything that’s more about operating tools than actually making decisions is starting to get chipped away pretty quickly.

At the same time though, I’ve noticed even with things like code or content, the output still needs a fair bit of checking and context around it. It’s great for getting something started or speeding things up, but not quite at the point where you can just leave it to run on its own.

I’ve heard a few AI speakers like Cassie Kozyrkov talk about that idea of separating prediction from judgement, which seems to fit here. The tools can do a lot of the heavy lifting, but someone still needs to decide what “good” actually looks like.

Feels like the roles aren’t disappearing completely, more shifting towards oversight rather than execution.
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Start-up Small Business Needing AI Voice/Chat/Automation

A
DuskMind said:
Hi Everyone,

I wanted to ask if any small businesses or start-ups have considered using AI voice/chat and automations in their business and if you are already using AI in your business, what are you using and how is your experience? Thanks
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Yeah, a lot of small businesses are starting to play around with AI, and it’s actually becoming pretty practical. And I'm not an exception.

For chat, I use tools like Intercom, Tidio, etc. They answer common questions, qualify leads, or speed up responses. The “always available” part is usually the biggest win.

On the automation side, I use AI-driven tools to summarise enquiries, route leads based on intent, generate replies, or enrich data automatically.

AI voice is interesting but still a bit early in my opinion. It can work well for simple use cases (like booking or basic support), but it needs to be set up carefully to feel natural.

Overall, the best results seem to come when AI is used to support specific tasks to save time, speed things up, reduce manual work.
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How do you gauge value when starting out?

tony84
aripho said:
Yes, I did ask but it got 360'd on me.

I'm not sure whether to be quoting in the region of £12k p/a for an approach that includes keeping the lights on and licensing, with an escrow. That's based on it covering a day or so per month towards 'maintaining' it (but not 'enhancing') or around the £4k per year for a simple saas-like approach

As previously noted, I have no real idea about how much a company making 7 figures revenue would spend on their software; this isn't a transactional, business-integral system - somewhat more of an assessment/auditing/data analytics tool.
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In which case you need to work out what you plan on including.
The work, a contract, accountancy costs, development time, admin, training.
What happens if... Your system breaks, There is a power cut etc. What exactly will you be liable for? What happens if your costs go up? Our hosting provider upped our bill after the ukraine war started. Nothing unreasonable, but it was the first time they had increased costs in about 3-4 years.

If this has the potential to get bigger, then you need t price in the fact that you might need extra help. That way if you do need to increase costs, it will be a smaller increase required. One thing I found as a small business, I was far more profitable as a one man band than I am as a 3 man band.
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Looking for some advice on distributing a tool to help UK exporters

G
You say you have disclaimers about the service you provide. Do your competitors give these disclaimers, or do they stand over everything they do for customers?

I think there is a presumption with your business model that small companies starting out in business will want a free service. I do not think most small companies starting out in business will necessarily want a free service or even cheapest service they can find. Many small companies will want the best service that they can find and if their competitors are paying for that service, they will also be willing to pay for it.
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Companies will have to pay UK supplier invoices within 60 days or face fines

Paul Carmen
Justin Smith said:
So the Bank of England's inflation calculator is "rubbish" is it ?
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If you're using the BoE website calculator, it uses the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a basket of goods looking at the change in purchase prices of these goods (in a weighted basket).

You'd have to factor in any housing costs separately to CPI. This means it is "rubbish" for the real long term cost of living metrics versus wages we are talking about.

The Consumer Price Index including Owner Occupiers’ Housing Costs (CPIH), factors in an adjusted monthly "rent" equivalence figure. This inflation rate is quite a bit higher (every month) than the CPI, this adds significantly to real living costs.

Even the CPIH doesn't really reflect all true living cost changes; there are a few reasons for this, the basket of goods has changed a lot over time, plus it doesn't cover a large proportion of people in the UK being home owners. House buying and mortgage costs are considered a capital cost (even for private home owners) so not included. There is the old RPI data set which does include mortgages, this inflation rate is even higher again, having gone up 400% since the late 80s.

When you factor in the lack of affordable/council houses today, recent big increases in food and energy costs, plus use the right data sets for your calculations, you can see that wages have stagnated in real terms for a long time.

For those at the bottom end pay wise it's way worse, with their real earnings and disposable income going down over that period, and even more dramatically over the periods of successive Tory governments. Getting on the housing ladder is a pipe dream for many in low paid work, with benefits and food banks a reality even when they're working full time.

All your examples stated as facts, or in bold/capitals, are not "facts" they're opinions. This is common behaviour among people who don't use complex data to make an argument. The simplistic views and straw man arguments you've made don't stand up to scrutiny. If you think you can live on the minimum wage in most of the UK, why don't you give it a try and report back on your findings.
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Selling shares of my company

Mark T Jones
The real answer here is that you need dedicated & ongoing advice from a professional, otherwise you will end up in a right mess.

But start by giving yourself some clarity on what you actually want to happen, both short and long term.

Autism in business is essentially a title for a specific set of strengths & weaknesses - The key is to play your strengths and use professionals to bridge your weakness.
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BBL - finally 6 years are up! Spongebob plan has worked

gpietersz
@JEREMY HAWKE to clarify, I was thinking more of something I said in an earlier comment that the legal changes make Spongebob a riskier option even without a BBL. It looks like the intent is to ensure people either pay off creditors or go through proper liquidation. They are looking at blocking mechanisms for BBLs, but once you do that it would be very easy to simply bank strike offs if insolvent/wihtou paying creditors in general. If you have a BBL a strike off is not an option anyway, right?

JEREMY HAWKE said:
Only do this if you have no personal assets as you might be liable
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From what I read on MrBounceback they are using a mix of disqualification and criminal charges. I did not see any mention of going after personal assets of directors. Someone facing jail has bigger problems than them going after personal assets!

Judging by MrBounceback it looks like so far they are mostly going for disqualifications rather than criminal charges: 500 pages of "disqualification files" vs 20 of "BBL Jailbirds". That is despite most of the "disqualification files" involving false declarations and similar criminal conduct.
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Is telesales dead

M
WaveJumper said:
Unless you are in my contacts you won't get through
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I think this along with other modern technologies on phones (the main obstical or tool in the process) could be contributing to a decline.

Business number identification on the caller screen, sometimes marked as spam by other users or reviewers who may not have given the caller a fair assesement, could lead to your companies attempts being wasted.
The call wont even ring on the phone.
These settings are on by default on some handsets, hiya I think is one I saw on a Samsung for example.
People are quick to mark things as spam and leave negative reviews.

My advice to overcome this, as an outsider, would be to check your number isn't 'spam listed' or negatively reviewed on the web. Perhaps have the number you call from listed on the Web so its easily searchable and linked to some information about your company.

Perhaps send a text message with a website link prior to calling so the recipient can search you up.

Not many like unwanted door callers, in todays word a person's telephone number is their door to the outside world.

Also I find that many now a days prefer to find their own deals, info etc and act upon rather than accept anyone's help or offerings as they feel more comfortable knowing they have made an informed decision and perhaps don't want to have to make a decision on the spot.

Lasly I'm not sure of your audience but I have noticed that in my sector, very very little want to talk on the phone, they prefer to message back and forth for days - this could be for various reasons to do with modern life, time or location constraints eg imagine being on a bus or around kids, anxiety issues so many factors that I feel will be highly impacting telesales currently or in the future.
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New adwords promotion: £1400 ad credit if you spend £3300 in 60 days (check your inbox)

K
The increase in ad spend, has only increased the equal amount in revenue. Not profit. So it was a disappointed experience.

I have increased my ad bids and created more adgroups with slightly wider keywords. The cost per conversion has gone up (the conversion rate is the same) which suggests that I am overbidding on keywords.

It has made me value my organic search rankings, there are some keywords that adwords wants me to bid excessifly high for, because it beleives my "ad rank" is too low. I already have #1 organic search position for it. But google wants me to bid minimum 60p a click for the keyword. But the product sale price doesnt justify the bid. The product in question retails for around £20 average, it's not a £100+ product, so the 60p minimum bid isn't financially viable.

When shoppers are going back and forth between the search pages and ads. They might click an ad, and go back and the ad might go away so they cannot go back to the site they visited.

On organic seo your site is almost permanently there, on the search page. So it is much easier to find the website again. But with ads, google might not display your ad on every refresh, the ad placements might appear and then not appear in the same spot.
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