Management Accounts

The secret weapon helping businesses run better: BookCheck expert insight

Posted on July 18, 2022

The secret weapon helping businesses run better: BookCheck expert insight

With the help of bookkeeping and accounting experts BookCheck, SoGlos reveals the simple tool that could make all the difference to your business profitability.

Getting up-to-date management accounts to help businesses make decisions isn’t reserved just for big companies – small businesses can access this valuable information with the help of  bookkeepers, BookCheck.

Organisations county-wide and beyond have chosen the company to deliver monthly management reports, tailored to their exact needs – with SoGlos discovering why the service is so in demand.

BookCheck was founded by Anthony Pilkington FCA in 1994 and has grown to become a major force in the delivery of transformative bookkeeping with management accounts for businesses UK wide.

An increasing number of clients are also benefiting from its Xero expertise and skills, using the firm’s Xero Migration & Add-on Development (MAD) service – with new company BookCheck X Ltd being formed to specialise in this subject.

Can you explain what you mean by management accounts from BookCheck?

Management accounts are simply detailed profit and loss reports, together with a balance sheet. Unlike the year end reports, management accounts are monthly and customised to individual client requirements – so we highlight and focus on what they need to know.

We start with a conversation about exactly what a business wants and can alter this as and when required.

How do they benefit a business?

They help identify and fix things that are going wrong – such as being behind, duplicate payments, overpaying VAT and incorrect sales ledger balances getting in the way of collecting debts.

And on the positive side, they present clear information on how to reduce overhead costs and increase profits. Clients can see clearly what is going on in any part of their business, so allowing a focus on improving.

The BookCheck mantra is ‘measure to improve’. A key to this is reporting gross profit margins and comparing month by month. A one per cent increase in margin equates to one per cent of sales as extra net profit. The reports enable clients to keep a beady eye on that.

The information is a perfect platform for increasing profitability and improving cash flow. It also lets clients focus better on running their business, rather than worrying about book-keeping.

Can you summarise what one of the management reports looks like?

It is totally up to date information at the end of every month. It’s a profit and loss report in whatever detail is required plus a balance sheet. You do not have to wait until way past the end of year for the report on which to base decisions. By then the world has changed – the information is way out of date.

The key point is that each report is individually tailored to requirements – then it’s much easier to understand, to own it and then use to advantage.

Quite often owners can be completely divorced from their company’s accounting system, but with our approach they can even call up the management reports from home. It means they have the key information at their fingertips wherever they want it.

Does that mean a business will have a BookCheck staff member looking over their shoulder all month asking questions?

No, we settle this down to a smooth routine each month. BookCheck works ‘in the cloud’. It does all its work off-site. Funnily enough the company has always worked this way since it started 28 years ago.

Is the service you offer unusual?

It is what marks us out – our service is not book-keeping or monthly accounts but the two together.

Alongside our bookkeeping, our management accounts make us unique because we guarantee these are always both thoroughly checked and issued personally by a qualified accountant (we have 10). We tailor the reports individually for clients, depending on what they want from their accounts – and if they are not sure what they need to see and why, we can talk them through it.

It can be a massive benefit. Many businesses don’t have the resource to prepare these reports themselves and they are too busy just being a business.

We also have a support service to make sure clients can use the information as effectively as possible.

How do companies know this kind of service is right for them – can they try before they buy?

An initial discussion will examine the issues to be resolved – to see if the BookCheck service would fit. Ticking one or both of these boxes is a key indicator:

• Ongoing significant book-keeping issues

• Lack of quality prompt monthly management accounts

If so, then get in touch and we’ll arrange for our free 30-point accounting health check – done under an NDA, remotely and efficiently, with no obligation.

 

https://www.soglos.com/interview/business/the-secret-weapon-helping-glou...

 

This entry was posted in Accounting, Business Development, Management Accounts and tagged in Management Accounts, Bookkeeping by Caroline

On or Offsite?

Posted on April 7, 2020

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%. 


Gradually over the last 10 years our clients have moved towards an offsite service and nearly all new prospects want this. We’ve always delivered payroll this way – for 25 years. But now the remaining few have been forced to change. Perhaps surprisingly the transition has been pretty smooth - it helps a lot that we are very used to such a change. It clearly begs the question as to whether any of this should revert to onsite after this virus - time will tell.


Of course it’s not all positives - it does rely on the client to communicate efficiently. Most clients do but not all. There may be a bit of work assembling data to be sent to us but this is rapidly dwindling as more and more source data becomes electronic, such as purchase invoices. Documents now tend to be sent to software that routes the data automatically into Xero and the like. Such changes always improve efficiency and in some cases literally transform the business – it’s great to behold.


We abandoned going onsite to London years ago – the added costs and travel time were just ridiculous.


Canary Wharf – would you travel there for a new client?


We were all set to be appointed to a major new client with the first task being to sort out a huge reconciliation mess. We offered to do all this offsite as travelling to Canary Wharf was impractical for the staff we would have used. The prospective client declined our proposal and politely insisted that all the work had to be handled onsite and to a very demanding timetable.


The company needed an immediate start and wanted someone to work totally onsite full time for two weeks in Canary Wharf as it required working closely with their Finance Manager on a complex task. We questioned this as our 25 years experience told us that none of this work needed to be done that way. We therefore suggested that some initial work could be done onsite but other work could be completed remotely. 


Instead the company decided to use an onsite contractor to handle this phase 1 with a view to appointing us ongoing in the phase 2. Half way through phase 1 the contractor left, without notice. The work had been left in a poor state and the need was even more urgent with an extremely tight timetable for completion looming. We picked up the baton to achieve the complete reconciliations. The extremely tight deadline was achieved after the BookCheck team had unpicked and resolved the errors that had been made.


•    Our staff (from 60 staff) were split into teams, allocated to different streams of the work in order to get up to speed quickly and within the completion deadline 
•    We worked extremely long hours, including a full weekend and pulled together to complete phase 1, facing considerable time pressure to complete everything by an immovable deadline. This included a two year VAT reconciliation - transactions from Sage had to be manually ticked back to transactions migrated to Xero to ensure the first MTD VAT return was completed accurately and on time as it was. This work started on 2nd September for the VAT quarter that was due to be filed with HMRC by 7th September
•    FD and Financial Manager of the client provided schedules to show how things should be appearing in the accounts; BookCheck were tasked with making sure the accounts matched up
•    A lot of the work that the contractor had handled was unpicked and corrected.

The point is that All of this work was done offsite, without the BookCheck staff meeting anyone at the client. We acknowledge the full support from the client in assisting and communication with us – this was essential in achieving the objective.

It left us wondering why not use us in the first place? I suppose it’s a matter of trust - if you can see it you can control it? Obviously not.

So a silver lining from this virus will be a big push to much more working offsite for a whole range of jobs, after proving that in most cases it works well. Not before time in our opinion.
 

This entry was posted in Accounting, Business Development, Management Accounts, Payroll and tagged in Bookkeeping, Management Accounts, online cloud, Payroll by Caroline