Business advisory services that turn the numbers into better decisions.

Everything that uses your numbers to change what happens next, rather than record what already did. 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 is not a bigger version of the accounts; it is a different job using the same data.

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. That separation is deliberate. Bundling advisory into everyone's package means charging businesses for something a good number of them do not need yet, and it makes the value invisible when they do. You get the figure at the discovery call, in writing, before anything starts. If the honest answer is that your money would do more good getting the bookkeeping current first, we will say that instead.

Yes, and this is where most advisory work quietly fails. 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 and we will say so rather than take the fee. 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.

Whichever one answers the question actually keeping you up. 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, the problem is not information and coaching is the honest answer. Starting with all of it at once is how advisory becomes a monthly cost nobody reads. One thing, done properly, then add.

No, but the depth changes. A sole trader with one income stream needs a survival budget and a tax reserve, not a board pack, and paying for the board pack would be waste. 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. The questions are identical at every size — am I making money properly, what is happening to cash, what should I do next — and only the apparatus changes.

Forecasts are wrong in the detail almost every time — that is the nature of forecasting, and any adviser promising otherwise is selling something. What the work buys is knowing 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 and is worth reading before you engage anyone, us included.

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 fiction, and the money should go on the bookkeeping instead. Selling reporting to a business that will not act on it is a waste of your money and a poor use of our time. 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, not a lack of analysis. 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.