How To Survive the Apprenticeship Levy

North Wales is a region that’s jam packed full of small businesses, and from the recent news that a brand new apprenticeship levy is to come into effect from April 2017, a lot of small business owners that benefit from apprentice placements are starting to feel the strain.

Apprenticeships are good for multiple reasons. Essentially, an apprenticeship allows a graduate to start a career in their chosen profession on a training basis, and pick up vital experience and confidence through work until they are at a position to be taken on as a full time employee – as well as directly benefiting employers, (often those which run smaller businesses) with workers which simply wouldn’t have been employed at a higher rate.

Unfortunately, the new Apprentice Levy is making small business owners in particular rethink work placements, according to recent research conducted by XpertHR.

The small print of the new levy demands that small business owners with a paybill of more than £3m per year (which roughly equates to around 2% of businesses within the UK) to pay to fund apprenticeship costs. How exactly can this be weathered? Are apprenticeships turning into more of a headache for employers than simply employing the individual and providing other forms of work based training?

Not exactly.

The services of an excellent chartered accountant North Wales can help you decide the ins and outs of employing apprentices, and inform you about all kinds of clauses that you might not know exist. For instance, any good accountant will know that employers which pay the levy have access to a 10% top up fund from the government in order to help with additional costs which might not have been these since the beginning of April, as well as the oncoming Digital Apprenticeship Service (DAS) which is a web-based portal for accessing additional funding.

Essentially, the services of a good chartered accountant in North Wales is absolutely invaluable when it comes to navigating what exactly the government plans to add in and take away next.

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