Top SME challenges for accountants to solve in 2020

An insightful report into understanding what matters to SME owners, and how you can help them.

How your accountancy firm can engage the SME clients it most wants

In partnership with the ACCA, PracticeWeb has put together its most detailed SME insight report yet, drawing on data from one of the UK’s most active small business forums.

You can find our more about the report below, including some key findings, or just dive straight and download a copy right now.

You’ll learn:

  • What’s on the minds of SME operators and owners in 2020.
  • Their questions and concerns about Making Tax Digital, VAT and other accounting issues.
  • How your firm can capitalise on this to generate leads.
  • Opportunities to position yourself as strategic business advisers.

Get the research report

About this report

This report was created by Melissa Tredinnick who alongside her role at PracticeWeb, is the content editor for UK Business Forums (UKBF).

The best way for accountancy firms to generate new leads is by connecting with SMEs, answering their questions and providing solutions to the problems that keep them awake at night.

For this in-depth report, PracticeWeb, in partnership with the ACCA, has mined hard data from its sister website UK Business Forums (UKBF) to offer unparalleled insight into what’s on the minds of small and medium-sized business owners and operators.

UKBF gets about 80% of its traffic through organic search, meaning hundreds of thousands of visitors are coming to the site because they’ve visited Google and typed in a specific query such as,

“When does corporation tax become a liability?”

Focusing on the final quarter of 2019, it boils down the contents of 1,810 threads across 29 forums, and more than a million website visits.

It also takes into account views of UKBF’s weekly editorial content and interactions with a newsletter that goes out to an astonishing 21,000 subscribers every Friday.

What all this tells us is that SMEs are hungry for business advice – something accountancy firms are only too keen to offer.

The report provides detail on the business planning and growth questions entrepreneurs are really asking, giving accountants a golden opportunity to connect.

Business owners want specific advice, not general

It also underlines a message PracticeWeb has been preaching for some time: business owners want specific advice, not general, that demonstrates real knowledge of their sector or industry.

UKBF’s accounts and finance forum received more than 300,000 page views, making it the second most visited on the site.

Users have specific questions about banking, bookkeeping, VAT and other taxes.

In fact, VAT was mentioned more than any other word in thread titles in quarter four of 2019 – does that suggest an opportunity for you?

From Making Tax Digital to business expenses to the pains of starting up a brand new business, you’ll gain a fresh perspective on your clients – and clients you’ve yet to win.

For each key topic, the report provides hard numbers and anonymised quotes from forum users that illuminate the motives and anxieties behind their questions, and suggests how accountants can use this intelligence right now to give their digital marketing the edge.

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