Management Accounts – Part two in a series of three blogs. In this the second of three blogs we look at who uses Management Accounts, what are the reasons for producing Management Accounts? Who uses management accounts? • owners/managers • investors • banks/lenders • factoring/invoice discounting • accountants • tax planners Why produce them? READ MORE

What are they, why do so few businesses have any and what most businesses do? READ MORE

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

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

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

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

The Purchase Ledger 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

The UK accounting watchdog, the Financial Reporting Council, is all set to review the bookkeeping of the big banks following the crisis of 2007 - 2009. READ MORE

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Why outsource or more positively why not? Outsourcing used to be something that was just for very large organisations. Increasingly though, small and medium sized businesses are realising the benefits of outsourcing some of their functions to reduce costs, increase resilience and allow them to do what they do best, run their own business. READ MORE

Talking about "The Cloud" is becoming common nowadays but nine years ago when we first hosted Sage, I was the man from Mars. No one would risk it, mainly because it was simply 'too new'. We used it for clients who didn't need to know! With the advent of new forms of accounting software such as Xero, naturally in the Cloud, with massive marketing budgets it's become normal and indeed arguably preferable to the old fashioned software on the local pc. READ MORE

We're all very familiar with the term SME and hardly anyone needs reminding that it stands for Small Medium Enterprise. It's used everyday somewhere or other. READ MORE

  How do you demonstrate to a complete stranger that they should invest in your business? What makes your business more attractive? How do you reduce the cost of the money (i.e. sell less equity for more money?). Here are 15 ways you can show that you are better than other competing ideas. This is not an exclusive list, just some of the most important ones. READ MORE