Matched funding for business advice, up to £2,000, is now available to small businesses from Whitefield Tax Limited under a new initiative with the government and small business network Enterprise Nation.
The Growth Voucher project, which is being jointly run with the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS), the Cabinet Office, as well as ACCA and other organisations, will see up to 15,000 small businesses receive a maximum contribution of £2,000 from the government in order to seek advice and professional support across 5 key areas: sales and marketing, management and leadership, access to finance, employment relations and making the most of digital technologies.
The initiative is aimed at businesses with less than 50 employees. Rather than simply throw money at them, the Growth Voucher project links funds to valuable advice from professionally qualified accountants that small businesses need as they look to grow, whether that be through accessing finance, exploiting the assets within the small business or through looking to export to new markets.
The Growth Voucher scheme has built in safeguards to ensure the advice and support small enterprises gain from the project comes from professionally qualified accountants.
As the ACCA have pointed out,
Anyone can call themselves an accountant, so to guard against that the government has ensured that advice under the initiative comes from a professionally qualified accountant, such as a member of ACCA. What this means is that small businesses will feel safe in the knowledge that the accountant giving them business advice has passed a rigorous set of professional exams, has already attained experience as a practising accountant, is bound by a code of ethics and conduct, and is regulated by a professional body. They will also have professional indemnity insurance to guard against risk.
This means a small businesses’ trusted business advisor under the scheme will meet the highest global standards. There is a misconception that accountants simply handle the books within a business. However, they also provide services covering both legal and planning elements to help a business such as tax compliance and planning advice, recordkeeping and reporting, forecasting and looking for the right type and mix of finance, and employment and payroll support. Under the Growth Voucher scheme, businesses that qualify for it will have access to this kind of support.
Find out more about the Growth Vouchers project at
Guidance on applying for vouchers are here:
Scheme T&Cs – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/growth-vouchers-programme-terms-and-conditions