Blog

All companies need to file statutory accounts every year but it’s an open question as to how much value if any this information provides to the business. The issues include: READ MORE

More than 25 years ago I attended a retirement party for the FD of a major company in London. Well into the evening this guy had a piece of advice for me. He said “Remember that the main thing is that the main thing is the main thing”. We’d both had a good few glasses and it wasn’t until the next day that finally I got my brain round this. When I subsequently started BookCheck in 1994 the first accounting system that we dealt with was Sage Line 50. Being the market leader for serious businesses most of our clients in the early years used Sage. READ MORE

Whatever you do, don’t follow this path. This is based on a recent client story. A familiar situation, cash is tight, even worse you’re making a loss. So the cash is getting even tighter. So you naturally push the sales button even harder and spend more time pursuing customers. Seems a sensible idea, so why not? READ MORE

The Accrual or Cash basis for Management Accounting? There are two basic methods for producing management accounts through the year – with accruals or just measuring the ‘cash’ through the bank. The accruals basis takes into account purchases and sales incurred by the end of the month that have not yet been paid. The cash basis is just that – simply what has passed through the bank account and nothing else. When accountants talk about "accruals and prepayments" they are referring to the monthly adjustment required to follow the accruals method. READ MORE

Making Tax Digital - should you be concerned? Making Tax Digital is a government plan to update HMRC with financial information four times a year instead of simply at the year end. This is set to affect about 1.6 million companies, 2.4 million self-employed and 900,000 residential landlords. READ MORE

Do you know the big challenger to both Sage and Xero? It’s something called Paper. Over 1 million businesses, about a quarter of all, use this method for their ‘accounting’. By paper I don’t mean Excel, I mean the real thing. With half using Excel that leaves only about 30% using proper accounting software. So HMRC’s Making Tax Digital, starting in 2018 up to 2021, is in for a challenge, or perhaps it’s the business owner with the problem as MTD is hardly optional. So should small businesses use accounting software? READ MORE

So first we had the long drawn out consideration of the EU Referendum, no it couldn't happen and no it shouldn’t and no it wouldn't but it did. We were bitten by the Brexit. Just as we were beginning to come to terms with this 'surprise' we placed our bets on the US Presidency and guess what, another presumption bit the dust, in fact a whole string of them did, at all stages of the process. So were they important - you bet. Did many presume too much - you bet. READ MORE

I recently travelled by train between Edinburgh (we have an office in Dunfermline) and Aberdeen and also between Bristol and Birmingham on the Cross Country route from Plymouth to Aberdeen. That made me realise that we have clients the whole 600 mile length of the line, in all these cities, in fact we have 15 clients in Aberdeen alone. Here's a north sea oil client the winner of a bottle of whiskey and a typical ship from Aberdeen harbour. 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

Quality Management Information The business world is divided into the haves and have nots - which one are you? Some have nots want it and others don't - fair enough, as there's no point in complicating matters if the information is not going to be used to increase profitability or value. What's interesting, at least from our perspective, are the businesses that don't know whether MI would be of benefit because they don't have the experience. So here are a few thoughts to help this group. READ MORE

Book-keeping should be simple. Something that, once set up with a professional partner, you barely need to think about. Why should you have to, when there are so many other business tasks demanding your valuable time and attention as you grow your SME? Too often, however, what should be a straightforward business service causes more problems than it solves. Here are some of the issues that SMEs and their accountants face – and a surprisingly achievable vision of the dream book-keeper… 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

Put business people together and it won’t be long before someone mentions outsourcing. It might be in the context of freeing time for the other activities you’re told you must do to compete in the market place. Or to do with concerns about maintaining service quality. Or even the difference between outsourcing and offshoring. Whatever the reason, the consensus is increasingly likely to favour outsourcing. 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

I reckon we are now experiencing our greatest challenge in our 20 years history in finding more quality Sage and Xero staff as we expand. This is especially the case in London although Bristol is almost as bad. Recently we received 33 serious applications for a book-keeper position. We narrowed that down to four good enough for interview, then speaking on the phone reduced this to two. The best candidate took a position before our planned interview, leaving one who just wasn't good enough. So we start again! READ MORE

The Purchase Ledger READ MORE

Whitehall's independent red tape watchdog reckons the govenemmnet has reduced red tape by £2.2 billion a year however the regulatory policy committee has calculated that new EU rules have inmposed £2.3 billion  in net costs to businesses. So looks like it's gone up! This is before the pension auto enrolment hots most busiisnesses in 2015 or later. Perhaps the benefit of such a consideration is to check what a business can do itself to avoid red tape and the most obvious way is to outsource so somebody else has to cope. 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

Sounds boring but ignore at your peril otherwise you could be mightly embarrassed. Suspense accounts are a sort of cop out. If your book-keeper doesn't know what to do with the input then it could well end up in a 'temporary' suspense which means it's not reported properly. READ MORE

With Tesco now revising its forecast profits down from the original £2.8bn to £1.4bn you might wonder. This is despite armies of accountants spending millions on this task. So how could it happen and why bother? READ MORE