The Corporate Finance Network collaborate each month with ACCA and its members to research accountants in practice and industry to find out their views of the market for their clients.
The findings are always very interesting and often reported by the national press. This month, the Financial Times covered the story as there were some quite shocking findings.
Business Leader magazine has quoted The SME Tracker and comments from our Chairman, Kirsty McGregor’s in its article today, as the British Business Bank’s Recovery Loan Scheme comes to an end.
In The CFN & ACCA SME Tracker, accountants representing over 90,000 SME business clients, reported that 49% of their clients have been put off or have abandoned applying for finance in the past six months.
The latest survey results from the SME Tracker published by ACCA and The Corporate Finance Network has been featured in many publications this week including Accountancy Today, Business Insider and Business Live
BBC Radio Scotland and ITV Wales have also covered the story.
This month’s survey results from ACCA and The Corporate Finance Network has been featured in the Scottish Financial News.
https://www.scottishfinancialnews.com/article/acca-cfn-one-in-five-small-businesses-believe-full-trading-recovery-will-take-two-years
The Corporate Finance Network’s SME Tracker survey, compiled in association with ACCA, was discussed in City AM today as CEO Helen Brand reviewed the past 12 months.
Titled “Tracking the pandemic’s impacts on small business” the article runs through the year, reviewing the key challenges and concerns raised by accountants.
“Counting the human cost of Covid — and of leaving small business owners behind” was the headline for the article on 23rd July, an opinion piece by Helen Brand, Chief Executive Officer of ACCA, who are backing the industry-wide campaign across the accountancy profession to #LeaveNoBusinessBehind
Referencing the mental health concerns accountants have for some of their business owner clients,
On 5th May, The Corporate Finance Network researched its accountancy members to ascertain their latest experiences of attempting to secure a Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan (CBILS) for their SME clients. Despite the much-heralded launch and apparent success of its younger sibling, the Bounce Back Loan on 4th May, CBILS still plays an important role in the rescue and recovery of more sizeable SMEs,
The Telegraph have seen the Open Letter to HMRC and realised that this probably explains why HMRC’s published statistics of completed furlough grant claims are so low.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/04/23/furlough-schemes-missing-millions/
On 31st March we worked with Andy Verity, Economics Correspondent for the BBC, on the story that the CBILS loan scheme wasn’t working and we shared our research that 18% of businesses (800,000) were probably, or definitely, going to run out of cash in the next few weeks. Andy first discussed the story on Tuesday 1st April in the morning on the Radio 4 Today Programme,
The Corporate Finance Network, representing some of the UK’s most proactive and commercially astute regional, independent accountancy firms, has undertaken research amongst 13,000 SME’s which predicts that in the next 4 weeks, as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown, 18% of all SMEs will not be able to survive, despite the support measures currently announced by the Government.
