Cleaner records. Better control. More headspace.

A fixed monthly fee agreed in writing before anything starts, priced on transaction volume, the number of bank and card accounts and feeds, whether you are VAT registered and on which scheme, and how much of the work you want to keep in-house. You get the figure at the discovery call. The largest single variable is the state of what we inherit: a clean file with connected feeds and captured receipts is a fraction of the work of a shoebox and a bank statement, and it would be dishonest to quote both from the same price list.

That is agreed explicitly in your proposal rather than assumed, because unspoken assumptions are how a VAT quarter arrives with nothing coded. A common split is that you raise your own sales invoices and photograph receipts as you go, and we handle purchases, reconciliation, coding and month end. Some clients hand over everything including invoicing and credit control. What has to happen at your end regardless is the paperwork reaching the system — bank feeds do the rest automatically, but nothing can tell us what the £340 card payment in Screwfix was actually for.

A month is normal. A quarter starts to cost you, because VAT returns get estimated and the numbers stop being usable for any decision. A year means the records are archaeology: receipts have faded, nobody remembers what the transfers were, and reconstructing it costs several times what keeping it current would have. If you are already a year or more behind, that is a catch-up project quoted separately from the monthly fee, dealt with oldest first to stop penalties compounding. It is common, it is fixable, and it is much better raised at the first call than discovered in month two.

Because Making Tax Digital requires it. VAT-registered businesses have had to keep digital records and file through compatible software since April 2022, and MTD for Income Tax phases in from April 2026 for qualifying income over £50,000, 2027 over £30,000 and 2028 over £20,000. A shoebox of receipts typed up once a year will not satisfy either. Beyond compliance, the practical gain is that a record captured at the point of purchase is a record that still exists in January, which is not true of a receipt in a jacket pocket.

FreeAgent, included in every Buzz package at no extra cost and worth up to £330 a year, suits sole traders, freelancers, landlords and smaller companies. Xero, where there is stock, multi-currency, several users or higher volume — we are a Xero Gold Partner. QuickBooks and Sage are supported if you are already on them and they work. Alongside the ledger sits receipt capture — Dext, AutoEntry or Apron — which is the tool that actually removes the monthly chase for paperwork. See the tools comparison.

Yes, and this is the honest risk with bank rules and AI coding. Automation is excellent at repetitive, identical transactions and confidently wrong on the exceptions — the personal purchase on the business card, the loan receipt that looks like sales, the supplier who is sometimes a cost of sale and sometimes an asset. It is wrong in a plausible way rather than an obvious one, which is why the ledger reconciling neatly is not evidence it is right. That is what review is for, and why a human still looks at the month before anything is filed.

They are yours and you take them: a full export of the accounting file, the underlying documents and the reconciliations. If the software licence runs through us, it stops when the engagement does, but you can move the subscription into your own name and continue in the same file rather than starting over. We will not withhold records over a disputed invoice. You should also keep your own copies throughout — you are legally required to retain business records for six years, and that duty sits with you rather than with your accountant.