Catherine Livingstone

With recent research for the Rose Review on Female Entrepreneurship revealing that 5,951 companies were established by women in Scotland in 2021, a figure that has more than doubled since 2018, Scottish Enterprise has teamed up with Accelerateher to deliver a series of finance workshops as pre-recorded sessions so that female founders can learn at a time that suits them.

The online platform will enable more female founders, especially those in more remote locations, to access AccelerateHER workshops which were previously delivered live, at specific dates and times.

Catherine Livingstone, partner and head of the business advisory services team at Wylie & Bisset, said: “The launch of these workshops is fantastic news as access to the best professional financial advice is absolutely critical for any start-up business.

“Many start-ups can achieve scale very quickly, so it is vital to ensure that entrepreneurs take advice on how to best structure their business enterprise at the very outset.

“And it is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to be more enthused about business opportunities and the market potential for their offering than the back-office requirements of monitoring cashflow, payroll and other administrative requirements so that it pays to seek good business advisers to ensure that they do not start off on the wrong financial footing.”

The first workshop series, ‘Understanding your Accounts’, builds greater awareness of profit and loss, balance sheets, and cashflow forecasting. The second series focuses on raising equity funding for high growth businesses.