BookCheck appoints new Managing Director BookCheck the Stroud based outsourced Bookkeeping with Management Information and Payroll specialist has announced the appointment of James Wetherall ACA, as their new Managing Director. James will work alongside the founding Managing Director, Anthony Pilkington who will become Executive Chairman of the fast-growing business. READ MORE

The COVID pandemic has had a dramatic affect on many aspects of our daily lives. For businesses though some aspects of these changes are likely to have a lasting impact and may even become a new type of business as usual. In this blog we look at the arguments for why COVID has made the arguments in favour of outsourcing bookkeeping even stronger than pre-COVID. READ MORE

The benefits of outsourcing your payroll and what to look for when choosing a provider 1 Resources Do you worry about who is going to run your payroll? Have you suffered a late payroll due to staff absence? If you outsource your payroll you won’t have to worry because it will be the provider’s responsibility to run, on time. Pick a provider with a sizable number of employees to cover holiday gaps etc. READ MORE

Sir Paul Chambers was never a household name, even in his lifetime but he came up with an innovation that changed the economy. This was back in the early 1940s when the world was at war and those left behind in Whitehall began to think about the post-war era. We all know about the other institutions founded then, the National Health Service and state education for instance but less is said about the seismic shift in the way tax is collected. Before then, most people paid tax in arrears, calculating what they owed and paying a lump sum to the taxman. READ MORE

Payroll tends to be a poor relation but boy is it important when it’s wrong One thing you can be sure of – if you mess up a payroll you’ll really know about it and it could have big consequences. That’s why it’s really important that whoever is responsible is accurate, reliable and on time. If not, it needs fixing. Payroll and Covid 19 READ MORE

It’s often a struggle fitting in the payroll processing but clearly it’s important to avoid mistakes which can quickly lead to staff problems and significant fines. Running a payroll is quite a challenge. It’s easy to regard it as a simple task when in fact an awful lot can go wrong, causing cost and upset employees, not to mention fines from HMRC or the Pension Regulator. The table below shows some of the errors we’ve inherited with new payrolls, nearly all of which you will need to be on the right side of when running your payroll, whoever does it.   READ MORE

This is an update to our blog in April “On or Offsite?” Before the virus, 15% of our clients were onsite, interestingly non on Xero. Clearly we had to change to 100% offsite and this was achieved relatively easily, to the surprise of most. This was partly because we are very experienced with the technologies and also because the client recognised that the move was unavoidable. READ MORE

Online working or Onsite? Our work of book-keeping with management accounts plus a payroll bureau was about 85% online before Covid-19, now of course it’s 100%.  READ MORE

It’s often a struggle fitting in the payroll processing but clearly it’s important to avoid mistakes which can quickly lead to staff problems and significant fines. Here are some of our experiences: Examples of payroll and auto enrollment problems READ MORE

1 You don’t have to worry about resources Ever had the worry of a late payroll due to staff absence? If you outsource your payroll you won’t have to worry because it will be the providers responsibility to run on time. Pick a provider that has a sizable number of employees to cover gaps. 2 You don’t have to worry about changing legislation When the law changes and the way you organise or run your payroll changes, it can be both worrying and time consuming. If you outsource your payroll all that stress is taken away. READ MORE

However you voted and whatever your view of the future, one thing is clear – prompt and sound quality MI has never been more important, yet the majority of UK businesses are missing a trick as they don’t have it. The norm is to fly by the seat of the pants, with information limited to sales, order book and bank balance and not always all three. READ MORE

I attended an auto enrolment presentation by Star Payroll on Monday. One of the speakers was Henry Tapper from Pension PlayPen whose analysis shows that the transfer of responsibilities from financial advisers to accountants and payroll bureaux intermediaries is happening far slower than expected. But things could be about to change, drastically. READ MORE

Yes, this headline is correct! With at least one industry observer reporting that SMEs are discovering more benefits than they previously imagined from auto enrolment, the time’s right to look at positive aspects of this fast-approaching requirement for SMEs like yours… READ MORE

We're well into this so what do we think so far? The first thing to say is that it really is a massive task, there is so much to learn and so much to get wrong. Compared with the previous biggest ever change to payroll, which was RTI Real Time Initiative, it has to be at least 20 times the effort and that's for our professional staff who are used to such. It's also quite different as it involves deductions from pay, so requires employee liaison. READ MORE

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We've just launched BookCheck Advanced Reporting. It's a huge breakthrough which we've been seeking for many years in linking Sage to Excel easily. Previously the only method was ODBC which although powerful is pretty hard work and a worry to many. Our software works as Excel functions so no ODBC and no rekeying. This transforms Sage reporting into the unlimited possibilities of Excel - any layout, colour etc. READ MORE