A close with no date
Management accounts that arrive when they arrive, by which time the month they describe is no longer a month anybody can decide anything about.
Compliance & Outsourcing
Business Process Outsourcing
The finance function run from outside the business — bookkeeping, payroll, returns, and a month-end close that lands on the same date every month.
- Owner-managed businesses
- Companies without a full finance team
- Groups standardising several entities
- Businesses between finance managers
- Newly formed companies
What we are usually called about
The questions this work arrives with
None of these is unusual and none of them is a failing. They are what happens when a business grows faster than the records, the systems and the filings that describe it.
One person holding the ledger
Bookkeeping that depends on a single individual, with no second pair of eyes over it and no handover if that person leaves.
Payroll as a spreadsheet
Payroll run outside the system, with deductions worked out by hand and no durable record of how a figure was arrived at.
Compliance done last
Returns prepared from a ledger that has not been closed, so the compliance work and the bookkeeping are effectively done twice.
Books that do not support the filing
What was filed and what the ledger says drift apart over time, and the difference is usually found by somebody else.
How the work runs
What an engagement looks like
Scope and fees are agreed in advance and in writing, before any of this starts. Where a step turns out not to be needed, it is dropped rather than billed.
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01
Takeover
Reviewing what exists today, agreeing the chart of accounts, the cut-off, and who approves what.
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02
Routine processing
Recording transactions, reconciling banks, suppliers and customers, and maintaining the ledger on an agreed cycle.
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03
Payroll
Running payroll from an agreed input, with deductions and statements produced from the same run.
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04
Month-end close
A defined close with a date on it, producing management accounts and the reconciliations that stand behind them.
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05
Compliance
Periodic returns prepared from that same closed ledger, so the filing and the books cannot disagree with each other.
Scope
What an engagement can cover
A list of what the work can include, not a package. What is actually needed is settled after the first conversation and written into the engagement letter.
- Bookkeeping and ledger maintenance
- Bank, supplier and customer reconciliations
- Payroll processing and the statements that follow it
- Month-end close and management accounts
- Preparation of periodic returns from the closed ledger
- Cover through a change of finance staff or of system
Bookkeeping and audit stay separate
Where the practice maintains a company's accounting records, it does not also audit that company's financial statements — reviewing our own work is not a review. Which of the two is wanted is settled at the start of the relationship rather than at a year end.
Who this is for
Where this work usually comes from
Retail
Chains running an ERP and a point of sale, where stock, margin and every invoice are now reported in real time.
Pharmaceutical
Manufacture and distribution sold through a trade that settles half its margin outside the invoice — in bonus stock, credit terms, discounts and credit notes.
Alongside this
What this work usually sits next to
One practice handles all of it, so nobody is coordinating between a systems consultant, a tax adviser and a bookkeeper.
Compliance & Outsourcing
Corporate Compliance
Company formation and SECP filings
Tax
Income Tax
Returns, notices, audits and appeals
Systems & Assurance
Internal Audit
Risk-based programmes and board-level reporting