Accountancy firm to wind down small business service
Accountancy firm KPMG says it is winding-down its cloud-based small business accounting (SBA) offering and will move staff to other parts of the company.
KPMG launched the SBA service in 2014, promising to “disrupt and dominate the SME market”. Initially it employed 200 staff across two centres. However, a crowded market has seen the firm withdraw from the small and micro business sector to “re-focus on core services”.
A dedicated website for the SBA service has been mothballed since Autumn 2018, and KPMG has told us it will now handover its clients to alternative providers.
A spokesperson for KPMG told TheBusinessDesk.com: “We can confirm that we are proposing to withdraw the provision of our Small Business Accounting (SBA) service in the UK, which offers cloud-based book-keeping to small and micro-businesses. This follows the decision by our UK leadership to re-focus our business on the services which are core to the firm’s growth. SBA services continue to be offered by KPMG in many other countries and are unaffected by this announcement.
“As part of this process we will be looking to redeploy some UK staff into alternative roles within KPMG whilst a small number of staff will continue to manage existing SBA client relationships to ensure a smooth handover to alternative suppliers. We are contacting all of our UK SBA clients to make them aware of this decision.”
The news comes in the wake of the Making Tax Digital initiative from the Government, which has been trailed as meaning “the end of the tax return” with taxpayers reporting their earnings and income in real-time via authorised software systems.
