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Tag: Small Business

Planning to avoid energy horror this winter?

Posted on by Susie Kevern

Do you have an energy strategy?

Even with the governments proposed interventions energy costs feel like they are spiralling out of control. Energy has been a relatively predictable cost over the last couple of decades, but as with Covid lockdown, uncertainty makes any sort of planning for the future seem risky. However planning is vital as this will have a big impact on cash flow planning.

While I was tidying out files last weekend and came across an articles that I had pulled out of CIMA’s members magazine in 2012. Energy costs were rising at that point, but the article seems ahead of it’s time now.

The positive thing about looking to reduce energy costs (and therefore usage) is that it also reduces your carbon footprint and improves future energy security.

1. Develop an energy saving strategy. Massive price rises make small steps like checking insulation, draught proofing and getting an energy performance review seem trivial. However these can also be relatively easy ways to start reducing energy usage, so make a good place to start. Furthermore, investing in building improvements will often qualify for tax savings.

2. Promote a change in staff behaviour. We are all aware of the current pressures of cost and the need to reduce carbon emissions. Welcoming and even offering rewards for ideas from your team for ways to improve energy efficiency gives everyone an opportunity to contribute

3. Look for quick wins: the same things that you’d do at home. Review your energy deals (that advice may not have aged well), turn the thermostat down a little, etc.

4. Monitor IT energy consumption. As we have transitioned to paperless offices and video conferencing we are using IT more and more. Staffordshire University studied their IT energy use and found that desktop monitors consumed 30% of their energy use while they were idle, and 40% outside of office hours. By encouraging users to turn off monitors when they were not needed they saved £65,000 per annum.

5. Install a smart meter (again, this may just frighten you more at the moment)

6. Use an energy management system. Similar to the principle of smart meters, detailed information about where energy is used allows targeted, informed action to reduce spend. Working to reduce the big energy usage slightly makes the impact far more noticeable.

7. Check efficiency of machinery. Whether this is IT, air con or machinery, everything works better when it’s regularly serviced. Compressed air leakage is often a huge (avoidable) source of energy waste in manufacturing companies.

8. Finally, because we’re accountants… manage the financials more effectively. Can you breakdown utilities by type, supplier, site? Getting better information about what’s driving spend to team leaders who can make changes allow them to act. Good data is essential to make good decisions.

In the current climate the article would probably have added “keep your fingers crossed” but taking action to combat the current price pressure and reduce future reliance on energy is much more effective.

Budgeting for real life

Posted on by Susie Kevern

Budgeting for real life is a never ending challenge: most likely you’ll be wrong, the only uncertainty is by how much. But, as I’ve talked about before, it is an exercise worth persevering with.

An effective budget is a vital tool for building a successful business. Putting one together is no small task however it shouldn’t be viewed as a once a year job. In real life new opportunities or challenges rarely come along with perfect timing so that you get notice just before you create your budget.

Would you turn down a golden opportunity just because there was no spend allocated to it in your budget? That’s like saying would you pass up a sale because you’ve already hit your target?!

To manage a business effectively you need to stay flexible and reflect what’s going on in real life. If your budget is a work in progress then it can be an useful tool to refer to when you’ve got decisions to make. You can answer the “what if” questions and see how a single choice fits in to the bigger picture.

Numbers are good that way – word descriptions are subjective, but numbers (obviously chosen with care and consideration) give a more objective interpretation of the likely effects of a decision.

So how do you make this happen?

First, the key report you need is one that marries actual financial performance so far with the budget for the rest of the year. Then you need to keep updating it with both new actual results and amended forecasts that reflect your ever improving understanding of what the future holds.

Then, when a new opportunity crops up, there are two questions to ask:

1. How good is this opportunity?
Does it advance the business towards its strategic goals? Does it deliver profit and/ or additional cash? Does it deliver other non financial goals (reducing carbon emissions, improving resilience, etc)?

2. Do we have the necessary capacity?
This is both in terms of the financial capacity to invest in a new venture and capacity within the organisation to manage the workload that it will entail.

Available capacity changes as it is continually influenced by current performance so having a reliable, up to date picture of how the business is performing as the year goes along is crucial.

Maybe this sounds like a lot of work, but it’s what management accountants love! If you want to review how well financial planning works in your business then get in touch.

Better business budgeting: making a more effective plan

Posted on by Susie Kevern

Did you work out a budget for this year, as per normal? Have you thrown it out yet?!

It’s easy not to bother at the moment; the last few years have shown how little certainty we really have when we try to plan ahead and the last 12 months have made it clear that that’s not changing anytime soon.

So why bother with a budget?

In my experience making your own predictions of how sales and costs are going to pan out during the year gives you the background to make order out of chaos. What is the coming year likely to look like? What needs to happen to do to keep all those plates spinning and what power do you have to influence it?

Budgets were first developed in the early 20th Century as a way of keeping financial control on a business. The thinking was that analysis enabled business managers to control spending. But is a budget an effective tool to limit spending or grow sales? I think we would all agree that the 21st Century view is that it NO.

First of all, there are three distinct ideas wrapped up in a budget; strategy analysis, target setting and resource allocation, and that’s where I’d say the theory starts to fall apart. You can’t balance the best case outcome and the worst case outcome in one document without reaching a hopeless compromise.

Strategy Analysis
It’s easy to think of a budget as a plan for the year, but actually it’s more of a description, in numbers, of what you expect your plan to deliver.

Life very rarely goes to plan, but understanding what the world will look like if your business strategy plays out allows you to check you’ve got the right strategy. Will your growth plans deliver the anticipated results? Can you declare the dividends that you are expecting to pay?

A budget allows you to check you’re heading in the right direction.

Target setting
Targets are usually about sales, but regardless of subject a target is always something you want to achieve (or will be a challenge).

If a budget is going to be reliable you’re going to want to keep your sales figures realistic. But how motivating is a sales target that is safe and achievable?

While right at the moment keeping up with last year’s sales may be a challenge in itself, a good sales team will always be aiming for bigger and better.

Yes, the figure used in a budget needs to be “expected” sales, but target setting should be handled separately. There is no real compromise between achievable and motivating.

Resource Allocation
Overhead costs often feature in a budget as a consequence: an uncontrollable add on (or actually a deduction) from sales: staffing costs £x, marketing costs are the same as last year, the insurance cost has increased so something else has to be reduced to keep the balance.

This is not financial control!

First of all there will be interdependencies – controlling cost may mean you haven’t got the capacity to fulfil new sales orders, etc. So the staffing budget needs to be detailed and reflect the strategy.

Marketing spend, and lots of the other costs need to be planned and matched to specific activities (drivers) rather than just using last year’s figure, or a plain percentage of sales. Marketing in particular is a topic for another post, but my message is that this is the time to stop and think about how the bills added up last year and choose what you want to do this year, not simply repeat ad infinitum.

So effective budgeting needs to balance these three competing features. There are other ways that your budget can become more effective though:

Communication
With all of this planning it is important that creating a budget is always a two way process. This is another flaw in the original theory of budgeting. It’s easy for finance to pick a number and run with it, but the people who are talking to suppliers are the ones with the real information. A successful budget involves integrating the plans and barriers for all departments and decision makers.

Challenge
One of the problems with budgeting like this is that sometimes the budget will show a loss on the bottom line, which can be difficult to accept.

The reality of growing a business is that you continually invest in growth so there may not always be a rosy profit available. It’s important not to distort the predictions simply to make the budget look more reassuring. It takes action to change the numbers, it won’t work the other way round. This is where a cashflow forecast is important; in the short term profit is less important than cash and if previous investments are paying off there may be scope to stomach a loss this year.

Review
It’s easy to create a budget at the beginning of the year and leave it at that. But the real power of a budget is to compare real life to what you expected would happen, and work out what action you need to take as a result.

In addition to this there are no rules about how regularly you should review/ update it. It is worth keeping it up to date. If you started last year with monthly sales of £40,000 and in March half your customers closed for several months a comparison between budget and actual sales would not have told you anything about the effectiveness of your subsequent actions.

I like to review budgets at least quarterly to make sure the information is up to date, but its not unheard of to review them several times in a quarter as the facts change.

Good information is the key to making good decisions. Cash is always my first priority, but a well thought out budget is the source of the information you need to make your cashflow forecast and keep your business going, and growing successfully.

Look out for more blogs here talking about how budgets can make your business more effective, and if you would like help reviewing your current budget then get in touch.

How to plan for an unknown future?

Posted on by Susie Kevern

How can you plan for the future when you don’t know what it holds? Come to think of it: what do you not know about your business?

December is usually a busy month for business planning with my clients as we spend time looking at the next year in more detail. That tends to be true even when their year end isn’t December 31st – the change of calendar year is a good time for reflecting on progress and looking ahead to the future.

However 2020 has already been littered with new forecasts, re-forecasts, new opportunities and dashed hopes. We’ve pretty much exhausted all the options for revising the financial detail!

Instead, I’ve set aside time to think about, and crucially, document the things that we don’t know about the future.

We don’t know whether there will be more coronavirus disruption in the New Year, or the impact that a vaccine will have on the economy – can it stave off the predicted recession? We still don’t know what Brexit will throw at us, but we’re used to that by now!

But what about other risks?
What if one or several of your customers moved their business elsewhere? What if one went bust? How reliant are you on a particular customer? What’s the spread of business (and importantly profit) between customers? How much do they owe you?

Where* do you think the risks could be? (* you’re bound to be wrong here, but considering the risks is still valuable). What action can you take to get better information, or reassure yourself?

How about your suppliers? How quickly could you replace one if they hit problems? How close are your relationships with key suppliers? And while we’re on the subject do you have adequate back up if a staff member handed in their notice?

Do you have deposits or prepayments with suppliers that you depend? And what about directors loans? This is getting generic now, because every business is different but hopefully you see where I’m going.

While this isn’t a cheery, “season of goodwill” sort of message the point is that a relatively small amount of time working out what you perceive the risks that your business faces are will let you start to plan around them. You will bear them in mind when you make decisions, perhaps even subconsciously. And most importantly when the worries are on paper, not stuck in your head, you can sleep better at night.

So what did I find out about the businesses I work with?

Firstly, I find it’s always enlightening to look at all my clients together (in private of course). They are a diverse bunch: small and not so small businesses in different sectors.

However looking at the challenges in one can spark off ideas about the challenges in others and that’s one of the benefits of having an almost outside perspective on the business.

The risks that I identified initially were:

  • Unsurprisingly Brexit is still a big unknown (no prizes for guessing that)
  • Continued Covid disruption (don’t even mention the L word) will either be a bonus or a hindrance depending on sector
  • Reliance on key staff is a threat everywhere, which is true of any small business. That’ll result in more efforts to document and share information in the New Year; improving contingency plans especially where business owners are concerned
  • A bit of work needs done thinking about the reliance on certain key customers and what can be done to reduce the impact if they were to disappear
  • And in one business we need to monitor the levels of cash paid upfront to suppliers – cash that would be lost if that supplier was to cease trading

So plenty of work to be done in the New Year thinking about future proofing business, even while we don’t know what the future holds.

If you would like to take a look at where the risks may be in your business give me a shout; I’m always keen to help. You can find out more about how I help my clients here.

Practical advice for micro business

Posted on by Susie Kevern

It can be difficult to get practical advice for micro business, especially when you’re on a budget. 

In an effort to share good advice and help every business thrive despite the current restrictions the team at North Devon’s Business Action magazine has developed a “Business Activist” feature. I’m delighted to have been asked to chip in with some answers to readers’ questions regarding business finances, and so it makes sense to share that advice here too.

All of the advisers who have joined the team are happy to give general advice to businesses who contact them, so if there is a burning question that you’ve never found the right person to ask then you can call me, or email your question to ask@business-action.co.uk

Question 1 (Autumn 2020): Can my micro business benefit from automating our accounts?
It depends what you mean by automating. Usually this means adding programs to cloud accounts software (Xero, QuickBooks, etc) to save time processing bills and invoices; what’s not to love about that? But getting value for money and for the time you spend is crucial.

I like to keep things simple; your time costs money but in a startup/ micro business you will always be directly responsible for making sure all the bills get paid. Whatever you do it is vital that you know what’s likely to happen in the bank account. What bills do you need to pay and when do you expect customers to pay you?

So accurate records are most important. You can do this on a spreadsheet, especially if you are not VAT registered. Actually a simple spreadsheet can be the best tool even when you have an accounts system as well.

What you may not realise is that now most accounts software will automate a number of tasks for you. It can link directly to your bank, offering huge time savings on copying details from a statement as well as helping you keep track of which customers have paid. In addition to this you can set up repeating invoices, send customer statements and see summaries of outstanding bills as well as much more to save you time and help you stay on top of your finances.

This is usually enough for most micro businesses; good value for both the money and time involved.

Question 2 (December 2020): Should I register my business for VAT?

If your sales come to more than £85,000 in any 12 month period you must register for VAT. But if sales are less than this the answer is very specific to what kind of business you’re in:

  • Who are your customers? Business customers can reclaim VAT on their purchases so adding VAT to your sales will not make any difference to them. Consumers on the other hand cannot reclaim VAT so it will increase your price by 20%. This is often crucial to your profitability, especially if some of your competitors may not have to charge VAT.
  • What do you sell? VAT on essential items is charged at 0%. So if you sell food or drink (not hot food or alcoholic drinks), books, newspapers, childrens’ clothes and some other products VAT will make no difference to the price.
  • What do you buy? If you already pay VAT on your purchases you may be better off if you can reclaim VAT. If your costs are mostly wages then you may not be.

If you think registering for VAT is right for your business then really you need an accountant’s advice. Keeping good records is essential, along with making sure you know the deadlines for reporting and paying HMRC.

Question 3 (February 2021): Can preparing a budget revive enthusiasm in our business after being closed due to Coronavirus?”

This is a dreadful time everyone, but especially for businesses who are reliant on customer footfall for their sales. Sometimes it feels like the pandemic might never end. But it will end, and this is a the perfect time to make plans for what you want your business to look like when it does.

In the short term it’s vital that you keep on top of bills that are due and make sure you have enough money in the bank. A budget is a great tool for that forward planning and gives you the information you need to make proactive decisions and have up front discussions with landlords and suppliers so you stay in control.

There’s more to it though; creating a budget and planning a vision for the future can be uplifting. It takes your attention away from current problems and focuses you on the future.

While you’re closed you have an opportunity to think about what you really want from your business; is what you’ve got now the business that you dreamt of? Would you make changes? What would it take to make this happen?

The future may seem a long way off right now, but this is a perfect time to plan.

Question 4: (April 2021): A roundup of questions about giving credit to customers

When you’re selling to another business they often expect not to have to pay straightaway. But allowing customers credit has a cost and can be a risk to your business, so what should you think about before you go ahead?

Q: Do I have to offer customers credit? No! It’s important to understand what works for you, not just what you think is expected. A cashflow forecast is essential here, it will help you see the impact of delays in getting paid.

Q: What about discounts? Some firms offer a small discount for prompt payment. If you include the cost of offering credit in your prices you can afford to give something away for quicker payment. It’s also worth remembering that some customers prefer a direct debit option as this reduces their admin burden while giving you more security.

Q: I’m worried if I don’t get paid now I might not get paid at all! You need to work out how much credit you feel comfortable giving. The best plan is to start small and look to build a relationship:
* make sure you have all the details you need for new customers: the right names and phone numbers
* ask for references from current suppliers and make sure you follow them up
* keep your book keeping up to date so that you know how much you are owed
* send statements and reminders BEFORE the payment is due
Most importantly speak to your customers regularly; check they have your invoices and know when they are due.

Handled well, offering credit can help you grow your business. But make sure you operate good credit control: a friendly phone call doesn’t cause offence and can build valuable business connections.

There’ll be more answers coming soon, but if you have a question of your own then you can contact me or email it to ask@business-action.co.uk

Find out more about how I help businesses here

Avoid second lockdown cashflow crisis

Posted on by Susie Kevern

Does a second lockdown mean cashflow crisis for your business? What can you do to avoid it?

We know that a lot more businesses are allowed to stay open this time than were able to in March, but staying open is not necessarily a good outcome. A lot of SMEs have used up what little cash reserves they had and are facing a tough winter.

Recent surveys have shown that 33% of SMEs think they will be impacted worse by this second lockdown and 20% are predicted to not make it through.

So what can you do to help your business avoid a second lockdown cashflow crisis?

Unfortunately I don’t have any miracle cure but the things that I have seen working to help businesses are:

  • Make sure you have an up to date cashflow forecast and try to make a list of the assumptions that you’ve made in it – how much, how often, what credit, is it realistic?
  • Look out for opportunities to cut costs; insurance may be getting more expensive at the moment but energy costs and interest rates have fallen. There are also grants available for investing in energy efficiency measures which may pay off in the future.
  • There are new extensions to both the bounce back and CBILS loans which may support your cashflow even if you have already used the facilities on offer.
  • You can “top up” an existing Bounce Back loan to reflect your new circumstances or use the government backing to add invoice financing or maybe an overdraft facility to an existing CBILS loan.
  • In addition to this the repayments can now be spread over 10 years which reduces the cashflow effects significantly. You can find my earlier advice on applying for CBILS support in this post.

The most important thing to do is to make sure you have accurate, up to date information to base decisions on: knowledge really is power here.  And check out my checklist for adapting your cashflow forecast for lockdown II to make sure you have a picture of the future that you can rely on.

Cashflow First Aid

Posted on by Susie Kevern

Previously I have talked about the importance of having a cashflow forecast, and how to get started creating one. Next in my series of posts about cashflow is my top tips for first aid for when that forecast is looking gloomy.

1. Good decisions need good data

You can’t run a business effectively without up to date information. In particular how much money is owed to/by each supplier and customer.

HMRC is always a key creditor to keep an eye on – the numbers are usually amongst the biggest payments that you need to make, which can lead to unwelcome surprises.

Just as important as up to date accounts is making sure your plan is up to date. Especially in the current climate the future picture can change rapidly so make sure you have confidence in your key predictions (sales, costs and associated taxes).

2. Monitor the vital signs

There is no replacement to monitoring cash everyday, plus most accounting software makes this easy to do. You do need to keep an eye on payments that have not yet cleared, so you know you can rely on the figures.

3. Assess the scale of the problem

In order to understand where cashflow problems arise you need to work out how much cash you need to take each month in order to sustain your spending; the “burn rate”.

This is different from breaking even on a profit perspective; notably it will include loan and finance payments and probably once a quarter VAT payments.

To find your burn rate add together all of your regular spending over a month (or whatever timescale you choose). Compare this to the cash you expect to receive from customers (factoring in VAT!) and the result will show you what you expect the change on your bank balance will be.

4. Quick wins

First things first; chasing any overdue customer debts can bring in cash straight away. This doesn’t have to be aggressive, but opening a dialogue makes sure that you stay at the forefront of your customers’ minds and increases the chances of you getting paid on time.

Get your invoices out promptly; as soon as the job’s finished or on an instalment basis if appropriate. This can make a big difference to the cash that’s coming in.

5. Review surplus assets

There are some assets that every business needs: whether that’s a delivery van, pcs, processing machinery or stock for selling on.

The problem is that this kit swallows up cash (even if you’ve had some credit before paying for it). Take a look at the stuff that you’ve got to hand and consider what it’s worth to you.

Could you raise cash selling off excess stock at a discount? Can you refinance bigger assets (eg vans) to release cash or reduce monthly payments?

This takes a little time and ingenuity, but may reap valuable rewards.

6. Prioritise

In the short term cash flow is more crucial than profit. With that in mind the first priority should be to tackle jobs that can be completed (and therefore invoiced) quickly. Bigger projects may generate more profit but the cash will take longer to appear in your bank!

Don’t go crazy and give away all your profit margin but it may be worth offering early settlement discounts to attract prompt payment to help with cashflow.

7. Reduce spending

Surely this is the most obvious way to impact cashflow, so why does it come at the end? Well, if your business is short of cash you’ve probably implemented some of this already; cancelling the “nice to haves” and limiting unnecessary spending.

Also, while some costs (often marketing) can seem entirely avoidable it is important to put that in context – the short term gain may come with a longer term cost, so it’s important to look at the true return you’d get on each saving.

If things are really bad you may be able to negotiate payment holidays with lenders or lengthen the repayment term which will reduce monthly outgoings, but look out for penalties and other charges that may negate the benefits.

This is only designed to be first aid for cashflow issues; treatment for long term ailments requires specific advice. Often the hardest part is to be objective and challenge fixed ideas. That’s the time to call in an independent professional.

Why bother with a cashflow forecast?

Posted on by Susie Kevern

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With CBILS, Bounce Back Loans, VAT deferrals, grants etc there may be more cash in the bank now than ever before and your cashflow is sorted for the next couple months.

But what happens after that?

Lockdown has probably helped the bank balance with customers paying while you’ve been running down stocks or furloughing staff. However the problems will come when customers start buying again: you’ll need to buy new stock or pay wages for sales that take a while to be paid for.

Right at the point where your bank balance has run right down you’ll need to invest more in your business.

In addition to this you need to keep an eye on payments due in the future.
Corporation Tax: usually paid October or January
Self Assessment tax: due January
Deferred VAT: due March 2021
Loan repayments: starting May/ June 2021
Plus regular VAT due every quarter regardless of other cash spend

A lot of this cash is heading to HMRC so perhaps a phone call will stem the flow? But that only drains cash from next year’s profits and stifles growth potential.

A plan for the future is vital, which means some sort of cashflow forecast. Even if it’s just a rough estimate, that plan allows you to see what pressure you’ll be under and give you time to take action.

And if you’re going to take action, the sooner the better.

Sometimes getting started is the hardest step to take. If you need some inspiration why not download this cashflow checklist, or if you would like further help then get in touch.

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What makes good management accounts?

Posted on by Susie Kevern

Usually management accounts look very similar to the set of accounts that you get at the end of the tax year, but on a more regular basis – usually monthly – and in more detail.

Most cloud accounting software produces all these reports, so surely that’s enough? In some ways, yes it is, but there are two things to remember:

First: “rubbish in, rubbish out”. Simply printing out a snapshot of the accounts is unreliable. To improve the quality of the information you need to:

1. Make sure you have enough detail to see what’s going on – “Administrative costs” is good enough for the year end accounts, but does it help you see where the costs have built up?
2. Check all the sales and purchase costs have been included (and the accounts are up to date). this sounds simple, but isn’t as common as you’d think.
3. Think about making sure that only costs associated with this month are included – if you deduct a whole year’s insurance costs from one month’s sales your results may be skewed disastrously.
4. This is where stock counts come in, but also prepayments (spreading an invoice over several months) and accruals (estimates of costs not yet invoiced).

This creates accurate and reliable accounts. The second thing to remember is that there are no rules as to what you need to show in management accounts. The real benefits come from shedding light on what’s going on “under the hood” in your business.

Things like:
Financial metrics: debtor days (a comparison of how long customers take before paying), ratios splitting sales between different products or services, etc
Non financial metrics: customer numbers, spend per customer, active orders, etc
Variances: how this month compares to last month, or to forecast
Forward plans: a radar highlighting where problems should be expected, and an idea of liabilities (tax bills) in future.

Good management accounts should give you the information you need to identify the actions to take to steer the business towards the objectives that you want and they help you track the results of those strategies as well as the unintended consequences.

This is not about having reams and reams of paper to look through every month. You need a dashboard that shows the information that you need neatly summarized so that it doesn’t take an expert to find the figure that you want, and clear and unequivocal so that you can make decisions quickly.

If you would like to find out more, or you have a specific issue that you need help with then contact Susie either via the website here or direct on 07801 199671 or susie@poundlane.co.uk

Train Life

Posted on by Susie Kevern

I set myself a couple of challenges with my New Years Resolutions this year: firstly, to reduce my carbon footprint and secondly to use my time more effectively.

So the first change to make on the way to achieving these goals was to switch the car for the train where possible. Admittedly I am lucky to live within a stone’s throw of the Tarka Line between North Devon and Exeter, but even so I have been surprised by the outcome.

First of all the train is cheaper than driving in to Exeter, especially when you add the cost of parking. And it achieved my primary objective of reducing my car’s carbon emissions.

In addition to this I can sit on the train working, reading, or writing (blog posts for example!). I try to spend my driving time listening to audiobooks and while this is mostly educational it always feels like using up dead time rather than being productive time.

So far so good, these are the changes I expected to see. But I have noticed other changes that I didn’t expect:

I have to be more organised – I think I’m pretty organised with my client work, but planning of my personal time is always far from being a priority. Now I am making more time for getting to and from events, so I am more relaxed and more likely to be on time!

I’m walking more, to and from the station, which I hadn’t realised would happen. And it’s through the centre of Exeter past all the lovely shops; because I’m walking I can I actually appreciate it, rather than just grabbing essentials at service stations.

Finally while I like to think that I am comfortable with new situations, I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve had to learn (read this as how many times I’ve had to ask people for more information!) and this has highlighted how stuck in my ways I’ve got.

I’ve learnt loads about the Tarka Line, needing time request that I stops at the right place, needing to find out which platform to be on (sometimes there’s just one, for both directions!), how long it takes to walk across Exeter, and how to solve the various problems that have already sprung up.

Plus I’ve learnt more tedious things like how my laptop bag isn’t as waterproof as I had thought and how I need to reconsider my handbag choices so that I can carry my insulated coffee cup around after its been emptied!

The bottom line is that I am loving the train travel, even without considering the money or carbon saved. So from next week I’ll be using the train for travel north into Barnstaple and I’m ready to consider the next change to make.