Gross margin is the percentage of revenue left after you subtract the direct cost of making or buying the products you sell. It tells you how much profit you keep on every pound of sales before paying for operations, salaries, or overheads. For growing SMEs, gross margin is the first number to understand. It shows whether your core business model works. A healthy gross margin gives you room to invest in sales, customer support, and growth. A shrinking one signals trouble in y

Processing supplier invoices manually means re-entering the same data, from every invoice, every time. OCR invoice scanning automates that extraction, so your finance system gets accurate invoice data without anyone having to type it in. This post explains what OCR invoice scanning is, how it works, and why it matters for growing businesses. What is OCR invoice scanning? OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition. It is a technology that reads a document and pulls out the t

The EU PPWR bans single-use plastic condiment and sauce sachets in foodservice settings from 1 January 2030. But the regulation becomes enforceable law in August 2026. From that point your restaurant, cafe, and hotel customers are under live obligations to start changing their operations. The EU sachet ban affects every SME food manufacturer supplying the foodservice market across Europe. Their pressure becomes your pressure. Fast. This post is the operational playbook for SM

The EU PPWR packaging regulation becomes enforceable law in August 2026. The SME guide to what it covers, who it affects, the key dates, and what to do now.

Exchequer has served thousands of SMEs well. Advanced has officially moved Exchequer to extended support, which means development has stopped. No new features, no cloud functionality, no roadmap. Just maintenance patches for as long as that arrangement holds. Meanwhile, the ERP landscape is evolving faster than at any point in the last decade, with cloud-native platforms pulling further ahead every month as the strongest Exchequer ERP alternative. The SMEs asking themselves w

Until recently, advanced supply chain tech belonged to one group: the giants. Real-time inventory optimisation, predictive logistics, automated warehouses all of it needed dedicated IT teams, six-figure budgets, and months of implementation. If you ran a smaller business, you watched from the outside. That's not the case anymore. AI has flipped the economics. The kind of tools that used to sit behind enterprise contracts are now subscription-based, mobile-friendly, and built