Forester Business award for Kit & Caboodle

Kit and Caboodle Boutique are feeling pleased with themselves today ( if not a little fragile) as we won the Forester runner's up award for best retail business, last night at Forest Hills Golf Club.

We were delighted to be awarded this as it is a brilliant recognition for all the hard work and effort that we have put into Kit & Caboodle over the last 10 months.

The funny bit is that I completely missed the honour of being awarded this title, as I has just nipped out to the loo. So my poor daughter and part time business partner Natalie had to go on to the stage and collect the award on her own, she hasn't forgiven me yet! Luckily the levels of alcohol I had consumed enabled me to see the funny side of missing my own moment of glory!
Louisa

Brave New World

Spring Budgets have had little to promise or offer UK savers and investors in recent years, apart from setting out the depth of the economic challenge ahead for the coalition government. Only last year, the mood was subdued, with talk of a potential triple dip into recession and a long and bumpy road to recovery. The UK’s economy, twelve months on, is undergoing a regeneration and a rate of growth that is now the fastest in the Western world. As Britain looks towards a general election in May 2015, the Budget contained far-reaching changes for its savers and investors.

Chancellor George Osborne, in his address on 19 March, said the Budget rewarded “the makers, the doers and the savers” in Britain. And the new pension and tax-efficient saving arrangements certainly offer radical reform of the UK’s personal finance landscape and welcome breaks for savers and investors after four years of austerity. A significant change in pension arrangements has lifted restrictions on access to pension pots and made it more attractive for individuals to invest for their retirement through pensions. And the reform of Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs) brings a very welcome increase in the annual allowance to £15,000 from July this year.

The boost that the 2014 Budget has given to investors, however, comes amid continued austerity, with the government only halfway through the fiscal consolidation it embarked on in 2010. Public borrowing levels still remain at £108 billion for 2014 (www.parliament.uk, 21/3/14). When the coalition came to power in 2010, Osborne had planned to balance the budget by 2016. Instead, the aim is 2019 (www.gov.uk, 19/3/14). The recovery also remains prone to wider global risks, whether from China’s economy or Russian military action. Meanwhile, there are widespread concerns that the recovery has been driven by consumers running down their savings, while households are squeezed by living costs as prices rise faster than earnings.

But the good news for business, markets and households is that the UK economic recovery has entrenched. In March, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) revised up its forecast for the pace of the recovery in 2014 to 2.7%, from 1.8% a year ago (when its estimate for 2013 growth was a mere 0.6%). The OBR also expects earnings will grow by 2.5% this year, and inflation by 1.9%. Osborne, in these more secure conditions, packed his Budget with a broad range of pre-election giveaways, including a reduction in the savings tax rate and an increase in the personal tax-free allowance to £10,500 for 2015/16. The Budget also restated that the Inheritance Tax threshold will remain at £325,000 until April 2018.

Investors have done well as growing economic confidence, loose monetary policy and low-interest rates have buoyed equities in the leading financial centres. Although 2014 is unlikely to match last year’s market advances, market returns are expected to reflect the improvement in the global economy and corporate and consumer confidence. In this upbeat environment, the Budget’s ISA allowance increase holds out further investment opportunity, particularly for those that want an alternative to the near-zero returns on offer from cash.

The Budget’s relaxation of ISA rules to allow any combination of stocks and shares and cash rightly gives investors more flexibility to manage their valuable allowance to suit their attitude to risk and their needs. However, the Bank of England Governor, Mark Carney, remains adamant that the base rate will remain at a record 0.5% low while the economy recovers; and is widely expected to be held at this level until mid-2015 (www.bbc.co.uk, 20/2/14). It seems unlikely that the government would welcome a rise in interest rates just before it goes to the polls.

Osborne’s move to increase the annual ISA allowance to £15,000 was designed to encourage Britain to set aside more for the future. With mild inflation still eroding the value of cash, the hope must be that investors make the most of the long-term benefits provided by this even more valuable and flexible opportunity.

Osborne’s decision to champion investor choice has also underpinned the more flexible new pension regime. Perhaps most radically, he has made proposals to free up access to pension pots and change the rules for annuities from April 2015, as well as introducing a new pensioner bond. The proposal to allow anyone over the age of 55 to take their entire pension pot as a lump sum (albeit with 25% tax-free and the remaining amount liable to Income Tax) is a radical innovation that allows individuals to invest, save, spend or give as they see fit. As an interim measure, the guaranteed income required before qualification for flexible drawdown has been cut to £12,000, from £20,000, and this retrospective move will allow anyone in drawdown to benefit from the increased flexibility.

The more liberal regime, too, complements the traditional annuity route and the security it offers for those who want a guaranteed income over their retirement lifetime. Annuity investors will benefit when interest rates start to rise; while drawdown investors can encounter problems in the face of stock market volatility. The new pension regime admirably hands more control to individuals over their long-term financial plans. But, as with all financial planning, each person’s needs and appetite for risk or security are distinct. Retirement planning requires expert, not off-the-shelf, solutions. Osborne’s brave new world for savers and investors creates further nuances and complexities that make wealth management advice as important as ever.

The value of an investment  will be directly linked to the performance of the funds selected and may fall as well as rise. You may get back less than the amount invested.  Equities do not provide the security of capital associated with a deposit account or a Cash ISA.

The levels and bases of taxation and reliefs from taxation can change at any time and are generally dependent on individual circumstance

To receive a complimentary guide covering Wealth Management, Retirement Planning or Inheritance Tax Planning contact Charlotte Poole-Graham on 07415855071, by email charlotte.poole-graham@sjpp.co.uk  or visit www.charlottepoolegraham.co.uk     

SMEs and Broadband

Are you capitalising on broadband connectivity?

It has been revealed in a study by Go ON UK ad Booz & Co that an additional £1.8b can be generated by incorporating digital capabilities, but in a report by The Broadband Stakeholder Group there are many smaller firms who are failing to capitalise on this.

The report has come up with a list of recommendations which could be used to better inform policy makers in SMEs on the benefits of using the internet and better internet connectivity.

So far £1.7b has been invested in the broadband infrastructure and SMEs need to take advantage of this and boost their own productivity.

Beta Telecoms

01291 620189

www.betatelcoms.co.uk

Wave Accounting in our opinion has really turned the world of web based accounting on its head, this is a truly fantastic application for small businesses that require a complete accounting application.
The internet is awash with invoicing services and trying to find one that fits your needs can be very difficult, do you want to subscribe to a service?, host the application yourself?, do you need to tie it into your banking system? Or do you just need a very basic way of issuing invoices?

In the last few years services such as Xero and Freeagent have made a massive impact on the way small businesses work, and to be honest I didn’t think that this model would change until I saw Wave Accounting.

What’s different about Wave, is that this service is completely Free, no subscription charge, no trial periods, no limits on the amount of invoices or customers you can create per month, it is truly free to use! The service was always designed to be free from the start and paid for by advertising other business services, these adverts are really unobtrusive and do not in any way hinder the use of the service.

Wave Accounting may not have the VAT and other tax advantages that Freeagent has, but it has all the features that small business needs, you can track payments into and out of your accounts, produce great reports that your accountant can work with, the service also links to your bank account and imports all your transactions automatically making reconciliation of your accounts really easy to do.

As the user base grows and people’s confidence in this business model increase then who knows, perhaps in a few months this may be the one that all competing applications and services will have to follow.

Would we recommend this to our customers? Absolutely, the only issue that we can see is the issue of trust!, will this service have the customer base to survive? and if not what happens to all customers data?, but there again this is a question that should be asked of all hosted services free or otherwise.

Kit & Caboodle Boutique facilitate their first ever fashion show

On Monday 31st March Kit & Caboodle Boutique facilitated our first ever fashion show at Lydney Rugby Club, as part of a Ladies Evening. The event was held to raise funds for the Forest Branch of Relay for Life. Other monies raised were donated to great Oaks Hospice in Coleford.

The models for the evening were all local volunteers, who put on a splendid show, bringing Kit & Caboodle's hats, clothes and accessories to life. The models all enjoyed the evening so much that they were eager to take part in a similar event soon. We were so impressed with the support for the evening that we are now in discussion with another venue, where we hope to hold a charity evening in aid of some local charities, at the end of May / beginning of June. This will be advertised on the CAP Website Notice Board as soon as I have confirmation of the details. I hope you enjoy the photos.