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A study last year by the department for business revealed that - finally - more women are taking the plunge and launching their own businesses. The number is still pretty low - just nineteen per cent of SMEs are female-led, according to the study, but, more encouragingly, a quarter of new businesses - two to three years old - were formed by women. I was fortunate enough to speak at an all-female business event held by the New Entrepreneurs Foundation last week to drive more women to apply for its new programme, which got me really thinking about how we can encourage more women to choose the enterprise path, like I did. Something Anne Marie Morris MP mentioned in her speech really brought it home - women-led businesses contribute £70 billion to the UK economy. That is surely too significant a figure to ignore?!

16 Australian Entrepreneurs Share Their Tips For Securing Investment Funding Funding is a crucial element to any startup with dreams to expand and grow, to get bigger and better. Attracting the interest of an investor and asking them put their trust - and money - into your creation is no easy task. With this in mind, Business Insider spoke to some of Australia's most successful entrepreneurs to find out their secrets and advice to securing funding.

A serial entrepreneur Aaron Sylvan who lives in New York, contrasts the circumstances to requiring to hire both a carpenter and an architect when building a house. An accountant can analyze the big picture of your financial situation and offer strategic advice as he/she produces key financial documents, like profit-and-loss statement, if needed, and files a company's taxes. An accountant can also act as an outsourced chief financial officer, advising an entrepreneur on financial strategies, like whether to secure a line of credit against receivables when introducing new products after tax season is over On the contrary, a bookkeeper's jobs are the day-to-day hands-on tasks: making sure new employees file all the right paperwork for the company's payroll, submitting invoices (promptly) and following up on them, and paying the bills. The bookkeeper also tracks company expenses or company financial statements and can assure that every cost has been entered - and recorded correctly - into software like QuickBooks so that the business is ready for tax time along with filing any other reporting to, say, creditors or investors. "I don't keep receipts; they're a pain," says Sylvan, who runs Sylvan Social Technology, an ecommerce-services company. "Every month I get a bank statement with a gazillion transactions," such as taxi rides, meals, conferences and other expenses he has placed on his company's debit card. He said his bookkeeper spends a few hours a week sorting it all out. Consequently, Sylvan has a better idea about how his expenditures stack up in opposition to his budget. He is certain he won't bill clients wrongly or miss important payments. "Knowledge is power," even when it comes to the small details, Sylvan says. "If you don't have a bookkeeper, you're probably not being as strategic as you could be in how you spend your money." When to Bring in a Bookkeeper Sylvan has typically hired a bookkeeper for a few hour

If you're like most Americans, you probably didn't make a new year's resolution to get started with long-term financial planning. A staggering 84 percent of respondents to a New Year's Resolution Survey from Allianz Life Insurance said that financial planning was not among their 2014 resolutions at all-the highest percentage ever to reveal that in the survey's history. What held them back? Well, 30 percent said they don't believe they make enough money to "worry" about financial planning. That's bizarre. Shouldn't having less money increase your need to manage what you have effectively? Regardless of your situation, I hope you'll engage in the planning process this year-and the sooner you get started, the better.