Blog

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

Recent years have not been kind for charities as donations and grants have been cut. Both charities and donors are wondering if their cash is being used effectively. So it's even more important to keep a tight rein over financial matters, a responsibility that is becoming evermore a focus for trustees. However finances are often the area that receives insufficient attention. If you're a trustee, are you receiving prompt, sound, regular financial reports which you understand. If there's a doubt here then there's a risk. READ MORE

Every business inbox is awash with this huge change to the pension system, not to mention the phone calls. It’s pretty intimidating and the more you look the more there is to worry about. Nearly all approaches are from the scary perspective which is unfortunate because life doesn’t have to be complicated. Indeed the sign of a true professional is someone who makes it look easy, even if it isn’t. So following KISS principles that’s all to say. READ MORE

The First First Last week I addressed a CIMA evening seminar in Bristol. It was my first ever presentation to a purely professional group and the subject was Management Accounting for Growth. It was a beautiful evening so I was hoping that we would manage as many as half a dozen in the audience. Imagine my surprise to find 40 had turned out and just about everyone took a brochure home. The Second First READ MORE

Years ago I attended a retirement party in London for the FD of a top company during which, after no doubt a few glasses of wine, he made this observation to me in terms of career advice. I was struggling with the words that evening but worked it out the next day. READ MORE

We've been working together with a Cloud IT provider on business development and have realised how very similar IT and bookkeeping departments are. They are both essential for the business but they can easily be: tricky, uncomfortable, problematic, a worry, costly if they go wrong and they both very definitely can suffer from staffing issues. 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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