Accounting and business advisory services

Advisory is work that uses your numbers to decide what happens next. In practice: management accounts with commentary, budgets and cash forecasts, business planning, profit improvement, tax planning and financial coaching. Compliance work answers what HMRC needs to know. Advisory answers what you need to decide — whether to hire, what to charge, whether the good month was real, where the cash actually went.

It sits outside your compliance fee and is quoted separately, as a fixed fee for one-off work or a fixed monthly amount for ongoing reporting and coaching. Bundling advisory into everyone's package means charging businesses for something a good number of them do not need yet. You get the figure at the discovery call, in writing, before anything starts. If your money would do more good getting the bookkeeping current first, we will say that instead.

Yes. A forecast built on records that are three months behind, or a chart of accounts nobody has looked at since setup, produces a confident-looking document that is wrong. If your bookkeeping is materially behind, fixing that comes first. What you do not need is perfection: last filed accounts plus current-year management figures is enough to start most planning work, and the gaps that emerge in the first session usually tell you something useful in themselves.

Start with the one that answers your most pressing question. If you do not know whether you can afford something, start with a cash forecast. If the business feels busier than it is profitable, start with a profit improvement session. If you cannot see performance until the year end, start with management accounts. If you know what to do and are not doing it, start with coaching.

No, but the depth changes. A sole trader with one income stream needs a survival budget and a tax reserve. A business with staff, stock and borrowing needs monthly figures and a rolling forecast, because the gap between a good month and a bad one is now larger than the owner's headroom.

Forecasts are almost always wrong in the detail. The work shows you quickly which assumption broke and by how much, so you adjust in month four rather than discovering it at the year end. Where we get something wrong, we tell you and fix it. Our liability is capped at the fees you have paid us in the preceding twelve months, which is set out in our terms.

Yes, and it happens regularly. Common cases: the business is genuinely simple and profitable and the owner just wants confirmation, which a conversation gives for free; or the records are in a state where any analysis would be unreliable, and the money should go on the bookkeeping instead. The free 60-minute roadmap session exists partly to establish which of these you are before anyone quotes anything.

Advisory works on the numbers; coaching works on the owner and the decisions. Advisory tells you that your gross margin fell four points and that a 3% price rise recovers it. Coaching is what happens when you know that and still have not sent the letter — the reason being fear of losing a customer. Most owners need both at some point, and confusing them wastes money: buying more reporting when the problem is follow-through, or buying accountability when the figures are simply not visible yet.