Member Article

Don’t bury your head in the snow if you’re facing a 2020 crisis

MAKE it a New Year Resolution to sort out your business finances and prepare yourself for a brighter 2020 says a top South Yorkshire advisor.

According to Deborah Lockwood, director of leading Sheffield insolvency and recovery practice Graywoods, many businesses will go into the New Year fearing for the future - but doing little or nothing about it.

But she says the way to cure the midwinter blues is not to bury a business head in the snow but to enter the new year with a properly prepared plan to turn around a struggling business.

“There is a full range of options that we can utilise to help people to decide how best to deal with their business and financial problems,” Deborah explained.

“Certainly business owners who have their VAT quarter ending in November and December know that there will be a bill to pay in January or February and they need to be prepared for that.

“They should be planning their cash flow very carefully to make sure they can deal with their tax liabilities, not putting the thought out of their mind and hoping it will disappear.”

One of the biggest problems for struggling companies, she added, came from such issues as the Christmas shut down and providing holiday pay, plus the fact that many customers will take Christmas as their own opportunity to pay late for goods and services.

And it is this accumulation of often unavoidable factors that can simply add to an existing problem, when followed by January tax and VAT bills.

Deborah said, though, that there were steps that could be taken to ensure a business survives into a new period of trading.

“Sharing the problem and exploring all the avenues for survival are the best options for anybody dreading the start of another year,” she said.

“Remember that a positive response today can certainly help to prevent a crisis tomorrow.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by John Highfield .