In light of the ongoing situation with COVID-19, we wanted to update clients, professional connections and friends of Berry & Oak about how we are responding.

We of course take people’s health and safety as a priority above all else. We want to ensure we put as much in place as possible to avoid having a detrimental impact on the health of our staff, our clients and our friends.

Berry & Oak will continue to work as normal and try to minimise disruption wherever possible. We recognise that we can make some changes in the short term, to reduce the possibility of affecting people’s health, without affecting the service we provide to our clients. The company and our team have agreed to put the following measures in place, until further notice:

Travel

We are avoiding using public transport and only travelling where it is essential to do so.

Meetings

We will be continuing to offer client meetings as scheduled, however from today, wherever possible they will be held via telephone or via video conference, to remove the need for face-to-face meetings and additional travel.

All non-essential meetings with third parties have been postponed

Homeworking

We have invested heavily in technology to be able to access our systems securely from anywhere in the world and to be able to work from home.  We will continue to work in the office for as long as we are able, but it is envisaged that at some point we may have to move to working from home.

We will be following all Government guidelines as a business. All employees have the ability to work from home and Andrew and Sarah have access from anywhere in the world.

Telephone

You can contact us on our usual office number.  If you can’t get through, then please leave us a message or send us an email and we will respond as soon as possible. Clientservice@berryandoak.com

Correspondence

We will aim to communicate with you principally by the Berry & Oak Personal Finance Portal, rather than by post. This is our preferred method of communication as we are able to share documents and communicate with you in a very safe and secure way.

If you are not yet registered for the portal please do so by clicking here https://berryandoak.mypfp.co.uk/account/register. Once you have registered for our portal you will find a number of helpful user guides in the documents section, or the bottom left of the home screen. If you would like us to so send you a user guide by email on how to use the portal, please let us know.

We will continue to monitor post for communications for which a hard copy is the only option but inevitably if the team are working remotely it will take a bit longer than usual for us to do so.  We would therefore ask you please to allow additional time when sending any time-sensitive correspondence (e.g. tax-year end paperwork such as ISA applications) to avoid the disappointment of missing deadlines.

Availability

Finally, we recognise that these are worrying times for everyone and we want to reassure you that we aim to remain available to our clients throughout the coming days, weeks and months, so please do get in touch as always if you need our help.

Stay safe everyone….