How to find what funding is available for small businesses and the self-employed

For more than two years, the Government has published different lines of subsidies and tenders funded by the Transformation and Resilience Recovery Plan. Every six months, the Executive renews its calendar of calls, many of them aimed at small businesses.

Some of the latest that have been published are the expansion of the Digital Kit for microbusinesses or the new Consulting Kit, which allows SMEs to access consulting services on Artificial Intelligence, online sales or other types of advice on digitalisation. However, there are dozens of calls apart from these that are published every month and that often go unnoticed.

Although small businesses make up the majority of our productive fabric, they tend to be the ones that have the least access to aid and tenders financed by European funds, as various experts, entities such as the Bank of Spain, have reported in recent years, along with economists and all representative organisations of entrepreneurs and self-employed workers.

According to calculations by the Savings Bank Foundation (Funcas), only 20% of the funds have actually reached companies or administrations for their use. The percentage is drastically reduced when talking about self-employed workers, micro-businesses or SMEs. Along the same lines, associations representing the group such as the National Federation of Self-Employed Workers’ Associations (ATA) have long reported that the majority of self-employed workers and SMEs – it is estimated that two out of three – do not even consider resorting to aid financed with European funds. In many cases due to mere ignorance of the existence of these lines of subsidies.

With the exception of the Digital Kit, which has been the call for aid for digitisation with the most requests in history, the truth is that the majority of European grant lines that have been published in recent years have not exhausted their funds. To publicise these calls, the Government publishes a calendar every six months with the next ones that will be published, and also has a platform that allows businesses to identify what aid is being implemented for them, if they remain open and how you can access them.

The Government has a website reserved for the Transformation and Resilience Recovery Plan. On this website, there is a specific section with a search engine that allows you to identify all the available aid. The platform can be accessed through this link…

https://planderecuperacion.gob.es/como-acceder-a-los-fondos/convocatorias

By accessing it, the self-employed person will be able to see all the available calls – more than 23,000 -, both the open ones, the closed ones and those that will be published soon. They are all spread over almost 2,400 pages.

In each of the calls, the self-employed person will be able to see an entry with the name of the aid or tender and its status: “open”, “closed” or “coming soon”.