Oct 30, 2015 | Accounting, Fugacious
Aiteo Consulting presented and interviewed at @HiredGrad speed networking on 29 November at Cass Business School. Great to meet a lot of enthusiastic students and present with exciting companies such as @seedcamp, @6_tribes and @restorationp.... read more
Oct 21, 2015 | Accounting, Advisory, Amaranthine, Enterprise, Finance
There have been a couple of great articles published in the Guardian’s Small Business Pages. So let’s look at the first one, which gives a few pointers on choosing an accountant for your small business. “Where’s the link?”, we hear you say. Well HERE it is, if you really must click right now, but we know everyone in life is busy, especially you, so we’ve extracted all of the questions the Guardian thinks you need to ask and listed them below. And, just to make things really easy, we’ve given you our answers before you’ve even asked. And as you’ll see, we like this article a lot. You could be forgiven for imagining that only our professional ethical standards prevented us from slipping the author a fiver to write it. Why? Well let’s see. Q. Are they regulated by a professional body? YES – we are. Aiteo Consulting is an accredited Member in Practice of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), the world’s largest and leading professional body of management accountants. CIMA has more than 227,000 members and students in 179 countries, all of whom work at the heart of business. CIMA also has very strong relationships with employers and sponsors leading research. And through CIMA’s joint venture with the American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA), we also hold the globally recognised designation of Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA). By the way, CLICK HERE for the public record. Q. Do they have PI cover? YES – and we’d be surprised if an accountant was operating without it, to be honest. Q. Can they act as your business partner? YES – and this is exactly... read more
Oct 8, 2015 | Advisory, Enterprise
IBM are offering up to $120k in #Cloud credit for your start-up if you build, launch and scale your business on IBM Cloud. Lots of information available if you... read more
Aug 27, 2015 | Advisory
The ICAEW and British Business Bank have published a great free guide to business finance, covering debt finance, equity finance and ways to find support and advice. Here is the link while it’s still up: FREE guide to business finance It can be downloaded as a PDF from the site. Of course, don’t forget to ask Aiteo Consulting for... read more
Aug 14, 2015 | Uncategorised
SmallBizDaily is an American website which does what it says on the tin – it provides news on things which matter to small businesses. So visitors in September 2012, not least among them the site’s owner, were shocked to find that it was not showing small business news, but instead displayed extremist terrorist videos. The site had been hacked months before, and the evidence had only just appeared. Why would anyone do this? Taking the question a step further, why would anyone want to hack the website or servers of a small business? In this previous post, I described a slightly implausible scenario where disgruntled customers wanted revenge. Most disgruntled customers are unlikely to go this far. A competitor might also want access to your accounts or to send your website offline – but if you’re a small company, you’re unlikely to be attracting that sort of attention. There’s another threat out there though, as SmallBizDaily discovered: cybercriminals. You might assume that cybercriminals would only be interested in the big firms, but you’d be wrong. Symantec found that between 2010-2012, 40% of all targeted attacks were aimed at small or medium businesses. It actually makes a lot of sense for hackers to target these. Firstly, your business is more valuable to hackers than you imagine. Even if there’s not much money that they could transfer (supposing they were to have located enough banking information to access a company account), they could modify your website to display spam or other unwanted things. This could get you delisted from Google and other search engines, with horrific implications for future sales. Your... read more
Aug 7, 2015 | Uncategorised
We know that our data can be vulnerable wherever it’s stored, but the News of the World hacking scandal showed that mobile represents a particularly problematic environment. Investigators breaking into Milly Dowler’s phone shocked the nation, but also revealed once again how insecure our personal data can be. So what can we do about it? There always seems to be some hack in the news these days – but it’s good to keep in mind that most modern mobiles are secure. Smartphones are essentially computers with the ability to use mobile networks, and like other computers the information they hold can be protected with encryption. The problem is that, by default, much of it isn’t. For example, it emerged in 2014 that the NSA and GCHQ could intercept data sent from apps such as Angry Birds, potentially revealing information about players’ age, sex and their device’s unique identifier. This doesn’t sound like a big deal – and for most people it’s not – but it shows how your personal information is at risk in a bewildering number of ways. Realistically, there’s very little you can do to stop agencies such as the NSA or GCHQ surreptitiously accessing your information. Against less sophisticated hackers, however, it’s a different story. Here, encryption can work very well – the trick is making sure your apps, especially those you use to send secure communications, actually use it. This is especially important with services such as online banking or accountancy solutions such as Receipt Bank. The Receipt Bank app lets you photograph your receipts and then automatically uploads them to its servers and extracts... read more
Jul 31, 2015 | Uncategorised
In early 2014, the New York Times reported that US law firm Mayer Brown LLP may have had confidential emails between it and Indonesia, whom it was advising in a trade dispute case, monitored by the Australian Signals Directorate – their equivalent of the NSA or GCHQ. High-profile cases like these may seem unlikely to affect small businesses, and most malicious parties don’t have the resources national intelligence agencies do. But cybercrime is a growing problem, and one of the reasons is that emails are often unsafe. What actually happens when you press ‘Send’? It depends on the provider, but for most cloud-based services such as Gmail, when you press send your email is sent via an encrypted (SSL/TLS) connection to Google’s servers. Here it’s checked for spam and viruses, and is duplicated so there are backups. Then it’s sent on, again via an encrypted connection, to the recipient. The sending process, therefore, is relatively safe (as long as your connection is encrypted – not all are). But what about the emails themselves? They often contain sensitive data, but they’re in plain text format. This means that if someone can access the email file, possibly as it moves through the internet or possibly when it reaches its destination, then they can read it. There are methods to protect your data – PGP (Pretty Good Protection) is one. It works very well: you just need to generate a private and public encryption key with one of a number of providers, then share that public key with everyone whilst keeping the private key totally secret, then find an add-on to an... read more
Jul 24, 2015 | Advisory, Enterprise
It’s a natural response. Your business runs on accounting data: profits; turnover; payroll; etc. Someone getting access to that data, whether they’re a competitor hoping to discover your pricing strategy and undercut you, or a disgruntled customer planning to dump your data online and discredit your business, is your worst nightmare. It’d be lunacy to put all that data into the cloud, which everyone knows is insecure. Except that’s wrong. Counter-intuitively, storing your data in the cloud – especially accounting data – is much more secure than storing it locally on your own computers. Why? Because, as David Linthicum helpfully describes, there’s a difference between control and security. When your accounting data lives on your hardware, you have full control of it. But it’s not very secure. To see what this means, imagine someone wants to gain access to your accounts. Imagine you own and run a fleet of ice cream vans, which drive every day to the best rural paradises Britain has to offer, refreshing those who wish to relax in nature with refreshing, organic gelato. One day, a family drives to a cool and shady glen, and amuse themselves by dropping litter, destroying flora, and terrifying fauna. They then, upon wishing to avail themselves of an ice cream, discover you’re no longer stocking chocolate in solidarity with the cocoa bean pickers of Ghana. Furious, they leave, vowing revenge. They have a cunning plan – they’ll hack into your accounts and publish them online, so that your competitors realise the size of the market you’ve tapped into. Rival ice cream vans will descend, and the unspoilt idylls will... read more
