When planning an accounting and bookkeeping services business, you need to nail down what service you wish to offer, to whom and how? It is suggested to best start at small and not promise something that you may not be able to deliver later.
Will you be a generalist or a specialist?
You can set yourself as a generalist offering a full spectrum of services to everybody or you might decide to be a specialist. Specialist targets a specific type of clientele narrowing down their relevant services. As a general rule, you will be offering from a fairly standard set of services.
Bookkeeping services you could offer:
There are many traditional and non-traditional bookkeeping tasks that can add tremendous value to the business. You will probably need to offer some combination of these services to give yourself a shot at consistent work. Bookkeeping services UK help keep client’s books in perfect order, updated as per desired time without interrupting daily business operations.
The job of the bookkeeper is to take care of the day to day financial task of a company. The Bookkeeper's role is to collect data about purchases, sales, receipts and payments.
Following are the accounting bookkeeping services offered by many accounting and bookkeeping services in the UK.
Standard bookkeeping:
The first job in bookkeeping services is to maintain the ledger. This often involves setting up an accounting software and linking it with the client's bank to pull through transaction data. You might do the bank reconciliation yourself or ask your client to do it and double check their work. You’ll also check ledger on a regular basis to see if everything is going smoothly and correctly and fixing it, if it isn’t.
Training Staff:
Business owners and their staff may not understand their role in bookkeeping. You can offer to teach them what is to be done and when. The same goes for invoicing, creating expense reports and stocktaking. If they’re using bookkeeping accounting services software, then you can help set things up, create cheat sheets or checklists for various tasks.
Monthly reporting:
Set up regular health checks for business by producing a profit and loss statement, cash flow forecast, balance sheet, aged receivables reports and aged payable reports. Explain things to your clients, instead of just dropping numbers at them. Draw their attention to things that need attention. You can find specialist reporting software that converts data into beautiful, easy to understand graphs and charts. You can extend reporting to non financial numbers too, such as website data from Google Analytics.
Accounts receivables:
You can advise on payment terms, receivables, and chase overdues. It can be helpful to have someone from outside the business asking to make the payments. You may also decide how to deal with serial late payers.
Accounts payable:
Deciding when and how to do bills is vital but many business owners don’t have the capacity to do it well. They will either pay everything straight away or wait for letters to pile up. As a bookkeeping service in the UK, you may take up the charge of this , watching what's due and when and reconciling that against the cash flow forecast to decide when payments are made.
Filing taxes:
Keeping tabs on VAT collection, filing tax reports with the tax office and making payments. Bookkeeping Accounting services also ensures that the business is in a sound position to pay taxes when required. You can greatly improve tax time for your clients by tracking their tax liability and making sure they put aside the cash needed to pay.
Payroll scares a lot of businesses. You may offer the following:
Maintaining employee records
Calculating pay and deductions on payday
Creating payslips and making payments
Filing reports with HMRC
Ensuring that their deductions are applied at the correct rates.
Ensuring leave entitlements are accurate and administered at the correct rate of pay
Accounting Bookkeeping services you could offer?
Bookkeeping Accounting services is an important function for any business as it allows the firm to keep track of their financial operations and business efficiency. Accurate financial data allows the company to make informed and sound business decisions and improve the profitability of the organization.
Payroll Processing services:
Payroll accounting involves recording of employees wages, compensation, bonuses, commissions etc. after processing all the taxes.
Self-assessment tax returns:
Timely computation of various types of tax, hassle free filing of tax returns and expert assistance in making a fully compliant presentation to tax authorities.
Year-end accounts and CT Returns:
Offer clutter free, hassle free submission of year end accounts and CT returns to full avail legitimate exemptions.
Management accounts:
KPIs and crisp real-time reports to help clients gain an edge over competition, charting a path to steady growth and expansion across domains. Monthly/Weekly management reports are necessary to assist businesses in making sound financial business decisions.
The reports include the following:
- Cash Flows
- Balance Sheet
- Variance reports
- Profit and loss statements
- Annual budget and forecasts
- Accruals and prepayment schedule
- Intercompany charges and reconciliation
Types of clients you want:
Think about types of clients and what type of work you'd do for them. Defining your clients will help you to focus on bookkeeping accounting services.
- Would you like to work with:
- Sole traders?
- Startups?
- Traditional businesses?
- Tech-focused businesses?
- Specific industry such as retail, trades or hospitality
Lifestyle businesses?
Accounting bookkeeping services are required by all businesses in order to flourish and grow in the competitive market. However the services can vary from business to business.