COA Solutions – Business Accounting Software

Think small and you will undoubtedly get left behind. The increasingly global nature of business means organisations must look beyond the local or even national boundary.

Your organisation’s security policies may well be tight with significant time having been spent on creating information management best practice. But what about suppliers, are they just as concerned about the security of your organisation’s data?

Purchasing technology is tricky at the best of times. Systems have to be compared and tested. Once decisions are made, existing software has to be replaced and new applications integrated. Then, after all that, you have to hope for a return on investment.

What do you think of the PAYE review published yesterday? It’s pretty radical stuff to feed all employee data to HMRC each pay period from April 2012 and from 2015 move to HMRC calculating tax and NICs.

Your business is only as good as your people – it is a commonly used and accepted adage. But in the case of your own organisation, is it actually true?

There is little point investing in internal staff if you are going to cut workers at the earliest sign of a downturn. Training and employing staff is a costly process and it is surely remiss to write off such investment.

According to Government sources, Iain Duncan-Smith, the Work and Pensions secretary is about to split the DWP into two separate departments, one looking after welfare and one dealing with pensions. DWP has the biggest budget in Whitehall and has been restructured frequently in recent years. It was created in 2001 from the Department of Social Security which until 1988 had the health brief too, and despite this happening over thirty years ago, lots of people still refer to DWP as the DHSS!

Sometimes the most innocuous sounding announcement can have a big impact. Steve Webb, the new Pensions Minister, threw a lifeline to final salary pension schemes in the private sector recently by allowing them to amend their scheme rules to use the lower Consumer Pries Index (CPI) to uprate their pensions in payment and deferred or preserved pensions rather than the Retail Prices Index (RPI ).

HMRC’s Share Schemes Services Unit have written to their customers outlining the reduced level of support that they can expect as the annual share returns are about to be submitted – to the same deadline as P11Ds.

In its latest newsletter to stakeholders, HMRC’s David Ellis is very clear about the current service standards that employers can expect from the department, and one would suspect that with more budget cuts to come, this will become business as usual.

No one would dedicate time and money to a personal project that wasn’t core to their life, especially if someone else could do it better. So, why do so many businesses continue to push resources towards non-core activities?

To answer such a question, let’s start with a given: technology is undoubtedly the common underlying thread for all modern businesses. Whether your company is a producer of widgets or a specialist in high quality services, it will definitely rely on technology to ensure business operations run smoothly.

Such reliance on IT, however, does not necessarily mean software is a core specialism of the business.