HMRC are becoming more active in this field
With the Government looking to reduce the massive national debt it is likely that there will be even more pressure on Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) to bring in additional monies to the Exchequer. In addition HMRC were granted new far-reaching powers in 2009 and, using Schedule 36 inspection powers, Tax Inspectors can now visit business premises, inspect documentation and conduct record keeping reviews – all without launching a formal tax enquiry. In the last few months alone there has been considerable media interest in HMRC’s large scale enquiry projects into various professions and we believe this type of targeted behaviour is likely to continue in the coming months.

Our solution
In response to these worrying new powers, we are pleased to launch the Blossom Stream Ltd Tax Investigations Service. The service is designed to reimburse the costs of your defence in the event that you are selected for enquiry.

We offer our tax investigation service to all our clients allowing them to insure against the high level of professional fees involved in mounting a defence.

Protecting yourself against the potential for an investigation is an important consideration for any business as tax enquiries can cost many thousands of pounds and take several years to settle. All taxpayers are at risk and in 2008/2009 HMRC collected an additional £12billion through compliance activities.

Should you wish to discuss our tax investigation service in more detail please feel free to get in touch.

The reality is that a standard protocol does exist within the industry for enabling the switching process. The only things a client has to do are:

• Write to their existing accountants informing them of their to decision to appoint new advisors
• Pay any outstanding fees with their existing advisors

It’s a little like switching your bank account, but easier.

If you are thinking of changing your accountant, there are likely to be various reasons, such as:

• High fees or receiving unexpectedly large bills
• Poor communication
• Only hearing from your accountant once a year
• Receiving only a limited service with little commercial insight and direction
• Advice that is difficult to understand or realise
• Dislocation of service

Whatever your reason for considering a change of accountant, why not consider our service offering. We can offer you:

• A fixed annual fee, payable in monthly instalments without an interest charge
• A client tailored service from one point of contact
• Regular communication, with a guaranteed call from us at least once a month
• A modern approach and service offering, running from tax and accounting compliance through to web design and internet strategy
• Ongoing commercial support and direction with a partnering approach
• Access to a broad business experience base, we’ve worked both sides of the fence, advising and working within small owner managed businesses through to the top 100 FTSE.

So if your thinking of changing your accountant why not give us a call for a free no obligation discussion on 0121 314 8246 or contact us here.

Preparedness is a vital factor for delivering success within new start ups. Blossom Stream Limited prides itself on helping new businesses and self employed people attain the levels of preparation necessary to be a success.

Start up preparation comes in many forms, such as the obvious ones like having a business plan to the more abstract kinds such as formulating strategy, developing unique selling points and commercial approaches which outperform the competition. Our experience within business can help you marry the legislative requirements of starting up with the longer term commercial nous needed to stay ahead and stay profitable.

Here are some typical examples of how we can help you on the start up journey and going forward :

• Deciding on what legal form to assume
• How to extract profits in the most effecient way
• Building a robust financial system that can withstand the rigours of a potential tax investigation
• Navigating through employment law and establishing a payroll sytem
• Securing and pitching for external sources of finance
• Developing unique selling points
• Expanding your service and product offering
• Using cost effective marketing techniques
• Punching above your weight
• Being innnovative and new
• Implementing a website you can publish and manage content through yourself
• Building a sustainable and lasting business you can pass onto your children

These are just a few of the ways we can help you.

As a start up or existing business you should also consider the durability of your advisors. Of paramount importance, is having a qualified business professional on the other end of the phone, who won’t charge you a fortune, and be there for you in the longer term.

If you are starting up in business or thinking of switching your accountants, why not give Blossom Stream Ltd a try now and see how we can help to make your business a success. Call us now on 0121 314 8246 or contact us here

Our experience spans a range of sectors and business sizes, from serving the owner managed business community of Birmingham, Solihull and the West Midlands through to working in the blue chip and fortune 500 arena. We have the qualified experience and know how to support our client base through the challenges of today’s business and taxation environment.

To find our more read our about us section.

For a free consultation to discuss your needs please don’t hesitate to contact us on +44 (121) 314 8246 or contact us here to arrange a call back or appointment at a time to suit you.

Of vital importance are cost effectiveness, quality and depth of the service provided by the advertiser. 

You should look for an advertiser that incorporates the latest in web technology, framing it’s offering within a web 2.0 interface. This means providing your business with an environment which enables customers to engage in a conversation about your products and services, taking the traditional listing or advertisement to a discursive level of exposure. 

Our business internet directory, interlinkdirectory.com, can do just that for your organisation. By offering the traditional directory listing capability and then layering web 2.0 functionality within this, we have constructed a tool which can feature your business in a quality web advertising environment. 

Interlinkdirectory allows you to list your business, post articles about your products and services, and in turn allows its visitors to engage in discussion about you. All this creates a continuous stream of content, building value and fluidity within your small business web advertising.

Click here to visit interlinkdirectory today and find out more about what it has to offer

For start up businesses, getting off on the right foot is absolutely crucial to survival. We’ve prepared a five point plan here to help you stay on the track to success.

Build a coherent marketing strategy.
Find out where your customers are and what they read. Once you have these identified find out how you can get yourself into these places. For example, let’s say you are a new firm of accountants, book an appointment with your local chamber of commerce or business link office. Present your services to them and leave them with your business card featuring an offer, say a 10% reduction on all fees for new businesses. Ask that they pass on your card to every new business they meet. They will be constantly meeting new businesses and will be more than happy to encourage you as a new venture. This idea is transferable to many other business types, so give it a try. Your local chambers or link office can be invaluable in the early days of launch.

Keep on the right side of the authorities.
Remember to research out your responsibilities as a business before you begin to trade. Consider your accounting, taxation, employment law and regulatory requirements from day one. This can be a hard circle to square for any new business but its expedition is a necessary evil. If you are unsure of anything within this fold, always consult a professional before you make a move. A small amount of professional fees at the beginning can save you a fortune further down the track.

Secure a web presence from day one.
Having a web presence as a start up and small business will be crucial to your survival. In today’s information age it is an essential, giving you the right image and tools to communicate with the world from day one. Starting this journey at the beginning of your business is crucial, that way your web presence can grow with you. Far too many businesses get midway or fully through their launch before considering the option. It doesn’t have to be that way; websites can be built now for tiny prices and are scalable quickly and easily.

Know you market.
Be fully aware of your customer’s wants and needs. Go that extra mile in profiling them, for example use some keynote market analysis reports. These will tell you about buying habits, patterns and trends. Often these can be obtained at your local library for free. Once you have this data, relate it back to what you competitors are doing, if their missing something you may have found yourself a niche.

Never give up, but do be prepared to compromise.
The never give up attitude is an essential commodity for any new start up. Some days it will feel like nothing is going your way, but stick at it, fortune favours the brave.

Sometimes you will have to compromise; very rarely will everything go to plan. Having the ability to change and adapt to the circumstances in front of you is a vital characteristic for success.

You should not invest significant sums in a website without investing in some search engine optimisation or SEO. SEO is often an element of web design that small businesses neglect. This can lead to disappointment when customers don’t come visiting after a website is launched. SEO is essentially what convinces the search engines to list you and list you under the search terms relevant to your subject.

Another caveat to consider is how I am I going to benefit from an investment in a website? What are you going to get back? Yes you can put your website on your business cards and stationary, but you should want more? So think about how you can integrate your business into your web presence. Perhaps open a dialogue through it with your customers, introducing a forum to discuss their industry related problems. This is a powerful reason that will keep them coming back to you. That way your customers will start to see you as an authority site and so will the search engines. This functionality can be obtained quite cheaply.

You should consider building a social media hub around your website achieving similar results to a forum. The immeadiate place for starting this task are Facebook pages and Twitter pages. This might sound a gimmick? So go now and check out what companies like Vodafone are doing with social media.

The last caveat should be, can I sell it over the web? The answer to that question should always be yes, it’s how and how to do it effectively that is important.

For an in depth discussion as to how we can help you with your small business website, contact us here.

If you are are considering building a website for your business, ask yourself why you need one? We think the most pertinent reasons for why are as follows:

The audience you can reach with a website is truly enormous, it really is the world. The only limitation is how can you use your business to supply that market. The Internet and a website will enable your reach. If you already know how you can supply that market, you really are well on your way to exploiting the most the Internet can provide.

Using the Internet and a website as an operating platform can leave you with truly tiny running costs compared to your competition. It is now possible for some businesses to be entirely virtual or extremely close to it. All you really need is a PC and a place to run it from. Even for what are considered smoke stack or old industries it is now possible to be almost 100% virtual. Take estate agencies as a case in point, do they need high street offices? Absolutely not, it is possible to conduct these kind of businesses, and many many more who don’t even realise it yet, entirely online. In the process massive cost savings can be achieved, making your business truly competitive.

Staying ahead is critical for any business and without a website as a platform to access the latest technology, this could prove truly fatal. Just consider the evolution in technology over say the last two years. Communication is changing radically, virtually all mobiles can now access the Internet. There is now not a single piece of modern communication technology that does not interact with the net or need it as an essential to function. Now consider how people and businesses communicate with each other across the net.

 Heard of Linkedin, Alibaba, Twitter, Facebook, Mixx, Redd it? If you haven’t I suggest you do some research now. The list goes on and on. Now run them through a search engine, see how many businesses have Twitter pages, Facebook pages, Linkedin pages, and Alibaba pages. Still think you can afford not be there with your web presence? A website connecting to these social hubs is the only way to extract the most from them. If you need more evidence on how these social networking platforms are for right now and tomorrow, consider how they are affecting the recruitment industry. Look at all those employees marketing themselves on Linkedin. Now think how many businesses really need a recruitment consultant if they know how to use Linkdedin and are properly connected to it through their website.

Ok still not convinced? Think about this then? Look at how other businesses communicate with their customers across those platforms, telling them about new offers, products and savings they can make. Now factor in the ingredient that all that advertising and exposure was free and went global at the click of a button. Still not convinced?

Ok, let’s take the most stoic, technologically resistant business in the UK, no offence intended here, but let’s say it’s a small engineering business making fasteners and struggling to access global markets. Now lets build them a website with a store and install a payment engine, hook it in to every associated online social network, and give it exposure to 4 billion customers letting them know that UK quality is the best quality. You know that business it going to start taking orders. That’s a fact. If you don’t believe us, log onto Alibaba and have a look at all those other companies doing just that. Even with a tiny budget , you can be there with them and in places on the Internet that they haven’t heard of yet. It’s possible.

There is absolutely a social hub out there for your business and market niche, and they are holding your customers in a pool ready for you to access them. Now try and access them without a website.

Tired of hearing, “the cheques in the post”, with a website you can collect all your payments online and know their there, safe and secure. You can do this without a merchant account and any credit checks. With a website it’s possible to take payments from anywhere in the world, instantly.

In conclusion having a web presence these days is truly an essential part of any businesses trading and marketing strategy. The way it’s used is the key ingredient for success. A web presence can make you competitive, punch above you weight and deliver a hoard of customers battering down your door for more.

If you would like a web presence or would like to discuss how a web presence could benefit your business please contact us here.