The crisis facing businesses brought about by Covid-19 has served to confirm the importance of small and medium-sized practitioners (SMPs). According to a recent ACCA report, Responsible SMP pacesetters, there has been an unprecedented mobilisation of the SMP community. SMPs have been working individually and collectively to keep thousands of small businesses afloat, often working round the clock.
This assistance has often been virtual and extends across borders. The ACCA SMP community is actively sharing information and advice across the world’s markets.
‘We’ve been like business doctors – clients wanted a diagnosis,’ says Graeme Tennick, who runs his own Newcastle-based practice Graeme Tennick Accountants (GTA). ‘But now they are really listening and putting in place the solutions we have wanted them to use for some time now.’
Taking your own medicine
In fact, in many ways SMPs have been acting as an additional emergency service, helping to support businesses’ financial health around the world. They have been providing a vital link between SMEs and governments, either by guiding them through the myriad financial support schemes that have been made available by central and local government, or by lobbying these same organisations and giving voice to the growing concerns of the SME sector.
But this is just one half of the equation – SMPs are also businesses in their own right. While they have been working tirelessly to help support their clients, they have been doing so in the face of difficult trading conditions for themselves.
SMPs have been able to look more widely at their role within financial and social communities, taking a holistic view of the roles they can and should be playing.
Staff shortages, digital pressures and constantly evolving economic and political environments have meant that many practitioners have needed to take some of their own medicine to boost the health of their own businesses.
However, and this is one of the key messages of the report, SMPs have been able to look beyond the immediacy of supporting their clients and secure their own businesses. They have also been able to look more widely at their role within financial and social communities, taking a holistic view of the roles they can and should be playing.
Whether this is supporting local charities, working with schools and other educational establishments to improve financial literacy or driving social inclusion and mobility, SMPs around the world have been acting as a conduit to reassert their wider purpose.
Profit and purpose
‘Why should I say that I don’t want to do accounting when I am good at it and can use it to add some kind of meaning to life?’ asks Nasheeda CC, who founded Nishe in Dubai, inspired by the idea of combining profit and purpose in her business.
Nishe is a women-only accounting and consulting practice, reflecting its founder’s concern that too many women are dropping out of the profession. ‘The way I look at it, by hiring only women, we are making a statement, and through that we can try and change the mindset of the people, including the mindset of other women,’ she says.
This is just one example taken from the report that demonstrates how SMPs can set the pace for change. And they are doing so in the most trying of circumstances.
Sustainable approach
But they are setting the pace in a responsible way. During the lockdowns, both SMPs and their SME clients have adopted more sustainable practices out of necessity.
Digitally enabled procedures, which might have taken years to embed, such as remote working, paperless reporting and virtual meetings, are now common. Many firms and businesses are now questioning the extent to which they will ever return to ‘business as usual’, even to the extent of giving up their premises. This will have both cost and carbon implications.
Many will want to look at the deeper and longer-term issues of sustainability raised by the crisis, which can be seen as a dry-run for the lasting disruption that could be brought about by climate change.
Aleksandra Zaronina-Kirillova, ACCA’s head of SME professional insights and author of the report, says: ‘SMPs are a key part of the financial health system for the SME sector. They have proven to be the “emergency services” for small businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic, providing enhanced business support and access to finance, enabling SMEs to make a contribution to overall economic growth.
‘However, they also have a much broader and impressive role in society, which often remains untold.’
For more information
Responsible SMP Pacesetters is the third in a series of reports focusing on the role of small and medium-sized accounting practices in the wider business environment.
See also:
Careers in small and medium sized accountancy practices (SMPs)
