Thousands of companies across the sectors depend on outsourced accountancy and bookkeeping providers to manage administrative, reporting, and tax filing matters on their behalf, allowing owners and managers to commit their time and energy to other areas of running a business.
For many, it may be difficult to ascertain the services that will add the most value or prove most beneficial in freeing up capacity to concentrate on efficiency, productivity and customer relations, and the levels of support they may require as the organisation grows.
The business accounting specialists at James Todd & Co examine the types of services commercial accountancy providers offer, and some of the factors to consider when determining those options most relevant to your organisation.
Contrasting Bookkeeping and Accountancy Services for UK Businesses
We’ll start by clarifying the variances between bookkeeping and accountancy to highlight the primary differences between the scope of each service.
Bookkeeping, something we often provide for large and fast-growing businesses that need extra support to keep pace with administrative tasks, primarily covers day-to-day functions such as data entry, reconciliations and reporting.
For example, a company using our comprehensive bookkeeping service might expect us to:
- Enter accounts receivable and payable transactions
- Reconcile business bank accounts and credit card accounts
- Produce invoices or receipts to verify payments
- Run storage back-ups to ensure data is protected
- Circulate reports extracted from bookkeeping software
Accounting and supplementary services, such as business mentoring, go further and help businesses understand what their financial data means in terms of performance, tax liabilities and profit margins, and maintain compliant, on-time reporting to ensure corporation tax, VAT, and statutory requirements are all well managed.
While many clients opt to outsource general bookkeeping and accountancy, incorporating everything from tax management to data entry and performance analytics, businesses may have varying requirements based on the firm’s growth trajectory, key risks, and the higher-level support required with audit and regulatory compliance.
High-Demand Business Tax and Bookkeeping Support Services
Below, we’ve summarised some of the most requested services to illustrate what they include, how they may be beneficial, and to help you determine which may be most applicable to your business.
Preparing Annual Accounts and Financial Statements
A proportion of business clients first come to us because they need professional assistance preparing year-end financial statements, which they must submit annually to meet mandatory Companies House and HMRC requirements.
However, financial statements are far from a simple admin exercise that only matters at the end of the trading period. Businesses also find they need accurate reporting to help with:
- Tracking revenue against expenses
- Assessing the financial health and stability of the company
- Providing information and performance reporting to owners, investors and stakeholders
That could mean preparing monthly or quarterly profit and loss and balance sheet statements, as a set of management accounts, or compiling detailed cash flow reports to identify potential shortages that require immediate attention; far before the end of the trading year.
Company Bookkeeping Assistance
We’ve outlined the basics of a bookkeeping service, but this can also be structured as an initial project to bring records back up to date following periods of inattention or where your in-house capacity has prevented you from managing regular reconciliations and data entry tasks.
Our accounting clean-up service is designed for businesses experiencing high error rates or backlogs. A bookkeeping team can bring nominal ledgers, reconciliations, payroll entries, balance sheet accounts, and overall accounting systems back into line.
Tax Management and Reporting
Most businesses require support with tax declarations, and planning for forthcoming tax obligations, which we recognise can be challenging for ambitious companies who need to dedicate as much time as possible to their core activities.
Tax accountants can help with numerous areas, identifying possible tax compliance issues before they arise, assisting businesses in projecting and managing their onward tax liabilities, and advising on the appropriate tax treatment of a transaction to ensure all available efficiencies are applied.
As with financial reporting, tax planning isn’t solely an annual task related only to corporation tax. A skilled accountancy team will look to maximise available savings, claim all applicable reliefs and exemptions, and ensure your business isn’t paying a higher tax burden than necessary.
Business Financial Analytics
Working with an accomplished accounting team offering data analysis services can be incredibly useful, and actively contribute to organisational growth by leveraging the value within financial data.
This might include, for example:
- Comparing financial performance to previous trading periods or months.
- Evaluating how specific functions, departments or products are performing against others.
- Looking at benchmarking profitability or margins against your particular industry or sector.
Accessing these insights can identify strengths and weaknesses or highlight potential opportunities, which can assist with long-term business scalability. Businesses seeking investment can also use customised reporting to demonstrate the company’s overall financial position.
Strategic Business Planning
While many of the services covered thus far involve general reporting, bookkeeping or analytics, businesses can also benefit from more involved mentoring, business oversight or support with ongoing commercial strategies – using knowledge and data to inform their next moves, or responses to challenges that may arise.
Many business owners find it difficult to objectively view their performance or see how they can use existing reporting to drill down into financial metrics and identify new ways to improve profitability, sustainability, or gross margins.
Strategic mentoring means an experienced commercial accounting team assists in setting goals, determining the right indicators and targets required to hit those objectives, and then creating ongoing budgets and forecasts to highlight the stepping stones along the way.
Working with specialist coaches and advisers can assist with rapid growth, strategic expansions, and recognising loss-leading business segments that may be holding you back from future success.
Published by: Holy Minoza
