Business Essentials

Bringing you guidance from hands-on business advisers to help navigate business issues and to provide practical help with your contracts and commercial documents.

Our Spring edition includes a wide range of topics from SME private company funding to important updates at Companies House and the requirement for businesses to offer flexible working to employees.

This Winter newsletter is packed with helpful information and tips for SMEs. There's more on the emerging AI trend and the editorial focuses on online "free lunches" for hard-pressed business owners.

Our Autumn Newsletter addresses treating the cost of creating business contracts as an asset, and what a well drafted contract says about your business. We also have a range of useful contract tips for you to consider and we talk about the key issue of late payments.

Our Summer Newsletter is a great read across a range of topics that speak to SMEs day-to-day commercial issues. We cover GDPR and why it's important for small businesses, the dividend tax allowance from April '23, and how IR35 applies to partnerships, to name a few.

Indemnities play an important role in commercial contracts. They help protect the parties from financial fall out when things go wrong. That's why it's vital to have some understanding of what an indemnity is and how it works. This article gives an introduction to the topic.

In today's more litigious world, limiting liability in commercial contracts is a key part of the negotiating process. There are various ways that an effective limit can be written into contracts and this article looks at some of the more common methods.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play an even more vital role in our lives than it does already. Initially launched in June 2018, the publicly available version of ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI in 2020. We wanted to find out how ChatGPT might help SMEs, so we asked it some questions and we got interesting and, on the whole, helpful replies.

Our Spring Newsletter has a host of great content to give SMEs the boost needed to develop and grow your business. SME owners represent 99.9% of the UK's total business.

Employee, worker or self-employed- which is to be and how do you work out which one you are or are about to engage? These questions are fraught with confusion and trip-wires, so this article looks at the important factors that help decide who is who on the employment spectrum.

"Cash is King". Anyone running a business knows this to be true. So, being paid late for goods or services can and does have a material impact on the ability to continue to trade. Late payments are tough to experience but, however unacceptable, they are a fact of business life. This article explores how to deal with slow payers.

It's important that when provisions in a contract are being argued over, that there are some rules for resolving their meaning. This article examines the basic principles that are used in the English courts for interpreting contracts.