April is usually a busy month but this year it was just crazy, a day doesn’t go by without some mention of Covid-19 and new phrases such as social distancing are now normal. We really didn’t know what to expect at the end of March when the lockdown came in, many clients shut up shop and laid off workers and in many cases pinning hopes on the government paying at least some of the bills.
Fast forward to the end of April and we started to see some clients finally getting the financial help they need, unfortunately that isn’t true for everyone as for various reasons they didn’t qualify for some of the Covid-19 funding and those clients we’ll continue to help where we can.
We took a look at how April also changed our business too, whilst we’ve been a fully agile business since November 2019 it was just surprising how different the lockdown has turned out to be. A quick look at our phone calls found we made just short of 2000 minutes of outgoing calls and incoming usage was vastly similar too. With the rise in web conferencing we found that our internet usage topped almost 3Tb, that’s around 630 DVD’s worth of data.
During May we saw a number of the government schemes start to take shape, CJRS claims were now being paid to clients and Self Employed Income Support Scheme opened and in those first few days we assisted a number of clients with their claims using screen sharing and video conferencing.
We also took the decision not to charge payroll clients for processing CJRS claims where their workers were furloughed and where others have asked for help in submitting claims the various Covid-19 government support schemes we won’t be charging for that either. We believe that we are all in this together and that we should be supporting local business now and help get them back on their feet when the time comes.
We don’t know what June will bring, but we know at some point we’ll emerge out of lockdown and we do think now is the time to start planning for the slow and steady restart of your business and how you’ll cope with the potential measures that may be in place. Equally it’s also the right time to work through your business forecasts and costs, something that often gets forgotten!
Keep safe and keep in touch