Clive Unitt FCA

Clive Unitt is the founder of SquarePlan and a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (FCA). He has spent over thirty years in business, working across organisations of every size from sole traders taking their first steps to multinational public companies.

That range is deliberate. Much of the financial advice available to people starting a business is written either for large companies and scaled down, or by people who have never had to make a small business work in practice. Clive founded SquarePlan on the view that the numbers behind a small business deserve the same rigour as the numbers behind a large one, and that the owner should be able to understand and defend them.

Alongside his work at SquarePlan he has held a number of non-executive director roles, including in healthcare commissioning, care provision and pensions — positions where the job is to read someone else’s plan carefully and ask whether it holds up.

He writes here on business planning, financial projections, UK tax and the funding process, with a bias toward what actually gets scrutinised when a plan reaches a lender, a landlord or a regulator.