Strategic Business Review

Through our FREE Strategic Business File Review, we will help you understand the hidden barriers and threats facing your businesses. 

We are NOT a "Credit Repair" operation, whose pratices are considered by some to be unethical due to their efforts to remove or hide negative financial information, sometimes by dubious methods. 

Doddie Weir, former Scotland and British & Irish Lions rugby union star and Director of Hutchinson Environmental Solutions Limited;

"Although sceptical at first, we were impressed with the free Business File Review, a simple but important concept, and, having been guided through it, we were delighted with the idea and the outcome. Our Credit Rating has been retained at its highest value, especially pleasing with all the changes in the building sector and within Hutchinsons.                                                                                                                             This would not have happened without Chespond's help and input.                                                                                                                              We have already commissioned Chespond to look over next year’s annual Company House submission to see what else can be done.
I recommend this service as I imagine it would benefit nearly every SME that I can think of."

We work with companies to present the information in your annual submission to Companies House in the the most appropriate form to give the credit analysts the information they require to give your business a more accurate and truthful profile to anyone who makes a company search on you.

The large majority of MDs will be conscious of the effects of credit, but few are conscious, or even aware, of how many businesses engage in vendor vetting (company searches) and even fewer will be aware of what is in their own Business File (ie what anyone doing a search on the company will see). We will show you why you need to change this and have a strategy in place for when you file and what you include.

We will show you how your company actually looks on paper to others currently and then show you how it should look if some simple but significant changes are made.

There are many reasons that your Business File could look poor;

- In simple terms, any business turning over up to £6.5 million can file accounts that;                            a) have not been audited, courtesy of the Small Companies Filing Regulations or Abbreviated Filing (which removed the need for audit), and                                                                                              b) are devoid of such details as turnover, profits, losses, dividends, costs, detailed creditors and detailed current assets.

If an analyst does not have such information they cannot determine the strength of the business and so cannot set the right limits. 

Currently over 91% of 1.4 million active UK Limited Companies file abbreviated accounts (aka audit exempt) as can be seen above, (data source is Company House)

(See below data source Company House, in 2010/11 there were an estimated 15 million searches carried out on 1.4 million active limited companies. It is easy, not to mention scary, to calculate the average number of searches per company.)

A poor business file could leave your business;

- appear to be loss making when it is actually making profits;                     - non credit worthy when it IS credit worthy;                                                 - much smaller and so not worth trading with;                                              - less stable and so a risk to do business with;                                             - high risk and so not good to lend to, not worth investing in and/or not worth partnering.

This can effect your trade and non trade credit supply, can impinge on you winning contracts; can prevent you selling your services to any company that vendor vets; can hinder you obtaining finance and can prevent you from obtaining the true value of the company as and when you wish to exit.

We want to help companies understand that filing abbreviated accounts is not compulsory.

There can be very good reasons for a company to file abbreviated accounts, but very few MDs or CEOs are being advised of the implications and this deprives them of the choice, based on the facts, of whether it is right or wrong for their company. It is unfortunate that we see time and time again the significant damage that this can cause to their business.

If you have a healthy company then the last thing you want your clients to see the next time they do a search on your company is the message below.

This can trigger banks to activate secured charges and call in overdrafts; trade suppliers putting stops on your accounts; insurers prohibiting additional trade credit supply and could even lead to deals in progress being lost.

Speak to Chespond Business & Careers Services now about how to make your company business file an asset rather than a problem.

Chespond Business & Careers Services Ltd, Lauder, Berwickshire

Tel; 07976 096675

Email; david@careers-services.co.uk