Member Spotlight – Scrutton Bland

We met with Partner James Tucker to introduce Tech East’s new Business Advisory partner, Scrutton Bland.

Who are Scrutton Bland?

We are a multi-disciplined professional service group providing accounting, tax, insurance and financial services advice. We consist of an accountancy practice in the traditional sense of the word, but also have an insurance brokerage and a financial planning department.  Scrutton Bland Group spans four counties with offices in Diss, Cambridge, Colchester and Ipswich and we now have around  230 members of staff across those offices.

What services does Scrutton Bland offer to tech businesses in the East?

Our proposition is to provide tech businesses with a holistic suite of advisory services which they can access at every stage of their business journey and which essentially provides a one-stop-shop for their financial and business planning requirements. The principle is that we can help our clients get on with running their businesses, while we look after their financial and compliance needs. Having all your advisers under one roof is especially beneficial as a business grows and the complexity of their financial requirements increases. Our service can be tailored to members requirements, from basic accounts preparation all the way through to fundraising and cooperate finance. We don’t have strict  entry points for when a business can take advantage of our services, we work with businesses who are in the initial  the start-up phase through to mature organisations, one of the great things about working with Tech Sector is seeing how clients have started with the seed of an idea and nurtured their businesses into commercial operations.

How has Scrutton Bland’s tech offering evolved over the last few years?

In recent years it has become clear that technological solutions are playing a greater role in the traditional compliance services we offer and we are therefore focussing more and more on our role as an advisory partner to our clients.

We were early adopters of cloud-based accountancy solutions, and thank goodness we were, within a matter of years we believe all business will be totally reliant on digital to run their businesses. We established sblive in 2016 as a solution which offered clients a more than just digital accounting software, but which gave them the management information plus the advice they needed to know how to use it in order to improve their businesses.

In 2017, sblive was shortlisted for a National accountancy award. Since then we have gone even further and earlier this year we developed a Digital Advisory service headed up by one of our Directors Ryan Pearcy. The idea of the service is to support and guide clients as they navigate the maze of software and digital processes available to them.  From reviewing their internal systems and processes to making recommendations on which business software packages to invest in the aim of our Digital Advisory team is to offer a complete systems advisory service which make the process of digitalisation as easy and cost-effective as possible. We know that each client has different needs so we need to be prepared to help them with any aspect of their business from implementing cloud technology for sales and purchase ledgers, to helping then with wider applications such as capturing Research & Development expenditure.

What can Tech East members expect from Scrutton Bland?

Members can expect a personal approach. Although we have undergone a significant period of growth over the last 5 years we remain committed to the same core values around client service that we have always held. Our strategy as a business is to ensure that we are continually researching and adopting innovative practices across our all our services, so when we started speaking with Tech East about how we might align ourselves, it seemed like a natural fit. We are proud to be operating in the East of England and having just reached our 100^th year in business our history in helping in this region to grow and flourish goes far back. We believe in sharing our knowledge and will be running series of events over the next few months specifically to help members become better placed to manage their finances and business risk.