Standard Ledger

There’s a story doing the rounds in startup land right now. AI inference costs are high today, but they’re falling fast – so build through the difficult early period, lock in your customers, and margin expansion will follow almost automatically as the cost curve drops.

It’s a reasonable bet. It’s not a guaranteed one. And most founders aren’t modelling what happens ...

Most founders know the headline rate. If your company has under $20 million in aggregated turnover and you’re in a tax loss position, the R&D Tax Incentive refunds 43.5% of your eligible R&D spend as cash. So the logic seems obvious: spend more on R&D, get more back.

Except it doesn’t always work that way. There’s a mechanical limit that catches a lot of...

You’ve found your first US hire. Now comes the question every expanding founder hits: do you set up a US entity and run payroll yourself, or use an Employer of Record?

In this article, we walk through what an EOR actually does, why it’s appealing for early US hires, the tax trap it doesn’t protect you from, and when it makes sense to bring employment in-house instea...

Software valuations have shifted. Recurring revenue alone no longer commands the multiples it did a few years ago, and the SaaS companies holding their ground are the ones building AI directly into the product – usually to surface insights that make the tool meaningfully smarter, rather than bolting a chatbot on the side.

It’s a sensible move. It’s also an expensive...

When we wrote on the 2026 Budget’s CGT and trust changes in May, the government had flagged consultation on a possible startup carve-out but provided no detail. That’s now changed....