My Finance Department

Rather than a set of accounts just once a year, you receive a fully reconciled set of accounts each month or quarter, with a report pack containing your Profit & Loss account, Balance Sheet, Aged Debtors & Creditors, Cashflow Summary and an Executive Summary giving you the top-level information.

We'll work with you to establish what additional financial or non-financial metrics are important for measuring your business performance and report on these too; helping you keep growth on track, plan your cash, monitor your working capital and drive business productivity and efficiency.

We make it easy for you to regularly review your business's financial position and performance, helping you make well-informed decisions and meet your business goals.

Budget

We help you translate your business goals into a clear and credible set of financial targets for the next three years; producing a detailed budget for your business and tracking progress in your management accounts.

A good budget brings direction to your entire team as to what the business is trying to achieve - so you are all working in sync.

Forecasts

We'll also create, manage and update a rolling 12 month three way forecast of your profit and loss, balance sheet and cashflow. You'll know what the future financial performance and position of the business looks like, based on what we already know today and a clear set of assumptions.

Credible forecasts bring the future into the present, helping you take advantage of business opportunities and mitigate business risks.

Once a quarter we'll sit down and review business performance face-to-face. This maximises the value of our other services - enabling us to hone in on key financial insights and allowing you to drill into detail with us. We help you use all of the evidence, insight and analysis to make better decisions.

Meeting face-to-face allows us to discuss your business more broadly, giving you the opportunity to bounce new business ideas around and benefit from our insight into the financial impact your decisions may have. You can also use the the time to get a fresh perspective, and the benefits of our management experience, on any challenges that may have come up.

Your total tax bill is almost certainly one of your biggest business expenses. However, the government has a number of ways that it incentivises small and medium businesses using taxation. We can help structure your tax to take advantage of the allowances and other incentives available to you.

However good tax planning must start early; if we wait until after year-end to tell you you're facing a big tax bill it's too late to do anything about it. We'll meet you in month 10 of 12 of your accounting year to explore opportunities for reducing your tax bill, giving you plenty of time to put in place the plans we agree.

Success Mapping

In order to provide you with the value we want to, it's important that we understand your business goals. We'll meet with you annually to review your business and personal goals, where you stand currently and what obstacles you're facing. We'll help develop an action plan and check in with you more informally during the year to review progress. This service is included in all our business packages, as our minimum level of strategic support, so that we have the context and direction we need when working with you.

Strategic Mentoring

Businesses that want more support can upgrade their pacakge to include quarterly strategic planning. By meeting with you for half a day each quarter we can provide more in depth support. Whether that's business planning, identify and optimising your operational systems, providing detailed analysis of new opportunities, fine tuning your working capital management or reviewing how your finances are structured - we'll provide the support you need.

Co-pilot

For those that want the ultimate level of support we provide a full virtual Finance Director function - working with you on a weekly or monthly basis as a key member of your executive team. This service is ideal for businesses that want to accelerate their progress, get an edge over their competition or achieve their goals as quickly as possible. By working with you this closely we can maximise the value of all our other services and provide the must support towards achieving your ideal business.

There are any number of other ways an experienced Finance Director can add value to your business. We can work together with you to tailor the services we provide to match your needs. Examples of services we offer include:

Need to negotiate funding for new assets / premises? We can help prepare your business case - adding financial forecasts and insightful analysis.

Acquiring a new business? We can help with valuing the business, assessing strategic fit and the financial value of any synergies.

Need to accelerate organic growth? Use our expertise in data and analysis to make sure your sales and marketing are effective, and that top line growth is translating to increased profits and business value.

Need to turbo-charge productivity? We're experts in streamlining processes, improving automation and implementing better systems.

Want your profits to be more stable and your business more predictable? We are experts in measuring business risk and uncertainty. And once we've measured your key risks we can help you put in place strategies to manage them - stabilising your profits and cashflows.

Exit planning? Use our expertise to advise you on selling price. But more than this - we can identify and help put in place steps to improve business growth before you sell.

To find out more about how we can help see our Consulting Services.

Limited Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships

As a limited company or limited liability partnership, you are required to prepare statutory accounts that are compliant with UK accounting rules, and submit these to Companies House annually. We provide peace of mind knowing that this is all taken care of for you by our experts.

Sole Traders and Partnerships

Sole Traders and Parnerships aren't required to file statutory accounts with Companies House - however, year end accounts are still needed for your annual income tax self-assessment.

Partnerships and Limited Liability Partnerships

Just as importantly, we'll use the annual accounts and your partnership agreement to calculate individual partner's profit shares - providing peace of mind that this has been done accurately and independently.

Whatever your business structure, we'll make sure your tax position is optimised with all allowable expenses, allowances and reliefs applied.

Limited Companies

As a limited company you're required to file a Corporation Tax Return annually with HMRC. We'll calculate your tax obligations, take care of everything that HMRC require and inform you of the corporation tax payment required in plenty of time.

Along with preparing the company accounts and tax returns we'll also prepare the personal tax returns for Company Directors.  We go beyond just submitting accurate calculations and paperwork, making sure your board of directors are being collectively tax efficient in how you get reimbursed from company profits - with the optimal mix between salary, benefits, pension contributions and dividends.

Sole Traders, Partnerships and Limited Liability Partnerships

As a sole trader or partner you need to pay Income Tax and National Insurance on your business profits (or share of profits) under the Self Assessment scheme. We'll calculate your tax obligation(s), make sure you're being as tax efficient as possible and complete your self-assessment tax return(s).

If you're VAT registered we'll prepare and submit your quarterly VAT returns. Unlike many other firms we go beyond just completing your paperwork and filing obligations - we'll carry out an audit of all transactions for the period, checking that purchase VAT has been claimed whenever it can be (and not when it shouldn't).

We'll also keep reviewing the different VAT schemes (e.g. flat rate, cash, accruals) to make sure you're on the right scheme for you. And we'll help deal with any enquiries or investigations from HMRC.

Payroll can be complex and time consuming - especially with Real Time Information and pension auto-enrollment. We'll take care of the monthly preparation and filing of your businesses payroll to HMRC, and provide payslips to your employees (and Company Directors where relevant).

We can also advise on opportunities to reduce your PAYE bill, such as the £3,000 employer's allowance that is currently available to reduce your employer's National Insurance bill.

HMRC is carrying out more tax enquiries and compliance checks than ever before. Your business could be selected because of general concerns around your industry, because a customer or supplier was reviewed and issues found, or you could just be selected at random. If this happens to you, you will need to prove that HMRC's suspicions are unfounded. You'll be required to answer detailed questions and enquiries can drag on for several months. Without tax investigation cover, professional fees can come to hundreds or thousands of pounds.

We don't want you to have to worry about this, so include a service in all our business packages under which, in the event of an HMRC enquiry or inspection:

• We represent your case with HMRC, saving you the hassle, without any additional cost to you.
• If the case is complex, we have access to specialist tax advisers (including former HMRC inspectors) so that you have the best possible defense at no additional cost.
• If matters progress further, in most cases the professional fees for defending you will also be covered.

Most importantly, this means that you'll never have to concede to HMRC's demands because of financial pressures.

For Limited Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships - we'll keep on top of your responsibilities to Companies House, completing your annual Confirmation Statement, maintaining your statutory registers and generating the correct paperwork for your dividends (so that HMRC can't challenge them and tax them as salary instead).

For those who need it, we can take care of appointing new company directors through to more complex company restructures. Whether you're bringing in new equity investors or restructuring to make your business more tax efficient, we'll navigate the complex paperwork and reporting for you.

We're passionate about providing the highest quality of service and doing everything we can to help you achieve your goals. If you have a question we want you to ask it, without having to worry about incurring additional fees. That's why we include free phone and e-mail support as standard in all of our packages*. We'll get back to you via e-mail, phone or by sending you a short video - whatever's the best way of answering your question.

If your question is more involved, for example it requires specialist research into a complex tax rule or involves extensive calculations, we may not be able to answer it within the scope of our free support service. But in that case we'll use the time to scope out what's involved, how you'll benefit from it, explain this to you and put together a fixed fee proposal for completing the additional work.

*subject to fair use.

We maintain your bookkeeping records on cloud based accounting software. This has the advantage that we can share data seamlessly, allowing us to integrate our bookkeeping services with your business processes. It means we can make our services extremely convenient for you while keeping costs low.

The software integrates with your bank accounts, lets you check balances, upload receipts and invoice customers wherever you have internet access. We smoothly process everything behind the scenes; freeing your time to concentrate on running your business - with the added advantage that you can access your accounts from work, home or on the go.

We'll regularly log into your cloud based account and reconcile transactions against your bank records - a key step in making sure your records are up to date so that you can have confidence in using them to help inform your decisions.

We process all of your purchase invoices - using our expertise to make sure that expenses are accounted for correctly. The technology we use makes this extremely convenient for you.

We can arrange a special e-mail address for your suppliers to send invoices to, where we can process them directly. You can send us scanned copies, or even take a photo using the mobile app we provide. Once we've processed them we'll keep copies on your secure cloud account - so we have everything on hand if you need to provide evidence for HMRC or other purposes.

If your business involves providing payment terms to your customers or clients then high quality credit control is an essential part of managing your business.

This is an area that a lot of businesses find difficult, but we can help. We'll make sure your customers are chased up professionally and sensitively to get cash into your bank account whilst maintaining excellent relationships.

We can also put potential new clients through a credit checking process for you - meaning you have the best possible information before extending them credit.

Once your supplier invoices are processed - they need paying. Paying them at just the right time maximises your working capital while keeping suppliers on good terms. We can manage your supplier payments for you, setting up payments in draft then asking you to approve and pay. We'll aslo deal with any supplier queries and reconciliation of supplier statements.

We can futher enhance your working capital by helping you secure the best possible payment terms from your suppliers. Using our supplier payment service helps you build a strong reputation with your suppliers - we help you put that to use by checking the terms they are offering against industry norms, identifying opportunities and helping you negotiate better terms.

We'll make the monthly pay run to pay all of your staff salaries and expenses so you don't need to worry about finding the time to make sure this vital process is carried out. As for supplier payments, we set everything up, then ask you to approve and pay.

For most clients - this is something that's more efficient to be done in-house. But for some clients it can make sense for us to do this for them - typically where there are a small number of clients with long term contracts and staged payments.

If you need us to, we can set up a system so that we're informed when an invoice needs to be raised, collate the information needed, generate the sales invoice and get them out to your clients.