Specialist accountants for

Don't believe an accountant that tells you that you need an accountant straight away! This is a matter of preference. There are good reasons for appointing an accountant straight away, butthere will be times when it does not make sense to do so. It comes down to your preferencesand objectives.

The key constraint is when is your first reporting obligation. Understand when this is (you canread a detailed treatment of this question in our Accounting Timing and Obligations post) andtarget appointing an accountant with enough time for them to handle this. Company formationand Payroll can be done in a matter of days. A full year of bookkeeping and accounts prep,allow a couple of months so that things are not rushed.

Subject to the above constraint, you choose when to appoint an accountant based on yourrequirements. The overall price that you pay does not change:

• You can sign up right away and you will be able to access us for advice, have yourbookkeeping set-up and have us monitoring deadlines and thresholds and for this youwould pay the corresponding monthly/quarterly fee; or

• You can sign up later in the year, to reduce initial cash outflows and then at the end of theyear we would charge you for the missing months in your accounting period (so that youpay a full 12 months of fees for any accounting year).

There are pros and cons with both and which you choose will depend on your objectives. Havea read of our Sole Trader vs Limited Company post for a fuller discussion.

Tax used to be a real driving factor behind this decisions (LTD's were tax advantaged) however,successive Budgets have aligned the treatment.

If you are planning to extract all the profit from the business each year, then the most taxefficient structure varies based on the level of profit. You can see for yourself how this works by downloading our tax calculator for 2020/21.

If you are looking to grow your business, the liability protection and greater cash flow flexibilityof a Limited Company tends to be of more importance. This is because a Limited Company'sprofits are taxed at 19% whereas a Sole Trader is taxed on profit as income tax (which forhigher revenues results in a higher tax rate, however the money is now yours, taxed). So, aLimited company therefore has more cash it can use to fund growth (assuming your effectivepersonal tax rate is higher).

The last main consideration is subjective: certain businesses prefer to deal with LimitedCompanies. Being a Limited Company (and a VAT registered one to an extent) signals that yourbusiness is more professional and more likely to be a long-term partner.

As a guide, below roughly £200k annual revenue, the split is 50:50, and after this point most

Bookkeeping is the process of categorising all of your business' transactions into accountingcategories (called a Chart of Accounts). Accounting is the preparation of your various annualreports based on the breakdown of transactions for the financial year, which is the result ofcompleted bookkeeping.

Bookkeeping is an add-on service to Accounting, i.e. bookkeeping is required for creatingaccounts but the bookkeeping can done by you or you in-house bookkeeper, or you canoutsource it to us to do for you, something we are happy to do. We do not currently offer abookkeeping-only service.

If you have outgrown the expertise of your existing accountant, you would like to access ahigher service level, save time, or the costs for hourly accounting are spiralling out of control,then we can help.

There is a standardised industry protocol for switching accountants called ProfessionalClearance. You can sign up at any point, and when it comes to getting you onboard, if you havean existing accountant we will contact them to request a copy of the latest filings they hold foryour account. This process is normally quick, depending on your previous accountant'sresponse time, but it will not prevent us meeting any of your upcoming deadlines if there areany.

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