Coronavirus – FSB – Business advice and information (20/03/2020)
This blog is to try and drag together a few points which have come out of a broadcast FSB business advice webinar. As you can imagine there were lots of questions fired at the panelists, some of the ‘key discussion points’ that came up were:
Cash Flow – If you are struggling to get customers to pay, or conversely you are being chased for payment by your suppliers then communication is key. Have a conversation with the other party, everyone is in the same boat at the moment and will hopefully ‘understand’ why there are problems. We’ve all been there in the past when you don’t hear from the other side so you assume the worst and react accordingly, much better to communicate and understand what’s going on.
Loans – If you’re having cash flow problems the current advice is to talk to your business bank, they will be best able to advise you on how they can help. The Government support schemes are being announced and then are having to be turned into products that the banks can roll out to the customer.
Statutory Sick Pay – The announced SSP reclaim will require new legislation to be passed to allow this to happen, it’s expected that this will be passed before the end of the month. It will also require mechanisms to be put into place by HMRC and probably payroll software providers to allow this to happen, so it will take a little time for it to make a noticeable difference.
Insurance – Check your business insurances to see if you have cover under a business interruption section – it is possible you may be insured against what is happening.
Employees – I’m not going to try and summarise employment aspects mentioned in the webinar although they are probably key to many businesses concerns. Employment law is such a complex area that a business should discuss with their issues with a specialist employment solicitor / advice service.
Fraud – the current circumstances are potentially a new source of options for the scammers, if someone is offering help that sounds too good to be true then BE VERY CAREFUL!
The FSB are keeping their web page as up to date as possible and a fair amount of information seems to be available to non members – the website is https://www.fsb.org.uk/