5 Top Business Tips for Your Tech Platform

Tech platforms carry the potential for significant success, but often this potential is not fully optimised. Here are DUA’s top business tips for ensuring your tech platform reaches the heights it is capable of.

Know Your Tax Benefits

Fortunately, there are several lucrative tax relief measures that your tech platform can benefit from. The main three are:

Research & Development (R&D) tax credits – Designed to encourage innovation among the UK’s tech scene, these tax credits allow companies performing qualifying R&D to claim an extra Corporation Tax deduction for certain expenditure. It is aimed at businesses attempting to ‘resolve scientific or technological uncertainties’, making it available to any company developing new products, processes or services, or working to improve existing ones.

Tax Benefits for an Investor

The Enterprise Investment Scheme (EIS) – Through this scheme, investors who buy shares in small, private companies are eligible for a number of helpful tax breaks. Although there are requirements and obligations, the tax breaks EIS offers can be very beneficial both to investors and entrepreneurs. To qualify, a business must have under 250 employees and no more than £15 million in gross assets.

Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme (SEIS) – More recently, the SEIS was set up to offer similar tax breaks to even smaller companies. To be eligible for SEIS, a business must have no more than 50 staff and no more than £200,000 gross assets. The maximum amount that can be received through SEIS investments is £150,000.

Use Technology to Forecast Your Cash Flow

One of the surest ways to improve your efficiency and performance is to lead by example, and embrace other technologies. In the past, many businesses found forecasting cash flow to be a complex and time-consuming process, but there are now a range of tech options for making things faster, smoother and more accurate – from free, online cash-flow forecasting templates to more advanced applications like Futrli and Float, which can take the necessity of manual forecasting out of your hands and save you valuable time and resources.

Monitor Your Performance with Key Performance Indicators

Constantly looking for ways to improve your performance is crucial. Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, are tools that help you to do this – by monitoring the performance of key areas within your business and breaking it down into useful data. They will vary from business to business, but fundamentally they are simply a measurable value that provides the performance information that enables you, or your business’ stakeholders, to keep track of whether your business is on target to meet its goals. As with forecasting apps, there are a range of programs available to track your KPIs.

Customer Relationship Management Systems

At their core, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are just a way of using technology to manage your relationships and communications with customers – both current and potential. For a business model based on facilitating exchanges between parties, this can be an invaluable tool when used to its fullest advantage. By keeping track of all exchanges by parties and aligning all channels to centralise points of access, CRMs can help to create a valuable pool of data to be referred to at any time.

Automate Your Bookkeeping

One of the most significant ways in which technology has changed the ways organisations function is its ability to perform tasks that would previously have taken up a considerable amount of time and staffing power – and one area perfectly primed for automation is your bookkeeping. Online accounting software such as Xero and intelligent scanning technologies like AutoEntry can carry out tasks ranging from automated bank feed to the digital issuing of invoices and receipts.

As experienced accountants in Watford and London, DUA have the knowledge and expertise to help with planning and implementing new systems and processes. Our experts work with you to improve your organisation’s efficiency and productivity, so that you can reach your true potential.

Get in touch to find out how DUA can help your growth.