Year-end accounts tell you what happened. Management accounts tell you what's happening now.

A profit and loss, a balance sheet, cash reporting, budget variance, aged debtors and creditors, your KPIs, a view of what is owed in VAT, PAYE and Corporation Tax, and written commentary explaining what changed and what needs a decision. The commentary is the part that matters. A set of figures dropped into an inbox gets skimmed and filed; three paragraphs saying margin fell two points because of one customer, and here is what to do about it, gets acted on. If you would not act differently after reading them, they are not earning their fee and we should change what is in them.

They are quoted as a fixed monthly or quarterly fee, agreed in writing before the first pack, and priced on how many entities and cost centres there are, how clean the bookkeeping is and how much analysis you want behind the headline numbers. The honest driver is data quality: if the bookkeeping is behind or the chart of accounts tells you nothing useful, the first job is fixing that, and that shows up in the price. Ask on the discovery call and you get a figure, not a range. This sits outside a compliance package rather than inside it, because plenty of businesses do not need it yet.

Monthly if you have staff, stock, or decisions coming up that turn on cash; quarterly if the business is stable and the pattern is predictable. The test is how fast a problem can grow before you would otherwise notice it. A business with twelve employees can lose a month of margin without seeing it in the bank; a consultancy with two clients cannot. Start monthly for the first quarter regardless, because the early packs surface things nobody expected, then step down if the picture proves steady. Moving up and down is a conversation, not a contract change.

Not always, and we will say so. If you are a sole trader with predictable income, no staff and no stock, monthly reporting is a cost without a decision attached to it, and your money is better spent on getting the bookkeeping current and the tax planned. They start paying for themselves once there are people on payroll, stock or work in progress, real pricing decisions, or borrowing to service — because a single better-informed decision on price or a hire covers the fee several times over. The question to ask is what you would do differently with the information.

Year-end accounts are prepared for HMRC and Companies House, in a statutory format, describing a period that ended months ago. They are a compliance document, and they are accurate rather than useful. Management accounts are prepared for you, in whatever format helps you run the business, describing the period that just closed. They also include things statutory accounts do not: KPIs, budget variance, aged debt, upcoming tax liabilities and commentary. Year-end accounts tell you the score after the match. Management accounts tell you the score while you can still change it.

That depends almost entirely on how quickly the source data lands. Bank feeds reconcile automatically, but purchase invoices, sales data from a till or platform, stock counts and payroll all have to be in before anything can be closed, and the usual bottleneck is receipts still sitting in someone's van. We agree a cut-off date with you at the start and work to it. The first close after a handover is nearly always the slowest — it turns up an unreconciled account, VAT coded inconsistently or a stock figure nobody has checked in two years — and that is time well spent rather than an overrun.

They will usually ask for them. Lenders assessing a commercial loan, an invoice facility or asset finance want recent management figures and a forecast alongside the last filed accounts, because filed accounts can be up to twenty-one months old by the time they are public. What they are looking for is consistency: management accounts that reconcile to the last statutory year, a forecast built on the same assumptions, and no unexplained jumps. Producing these regularly rather than hurriedly assembling three months of them when a lender asks is the difference between a fast decision and a long one.

Yes, and they should be. A contractor wants job-level margin and work in progress. An agency wants utilisation and revenue per head. An e-commerce business wants channel-level contribution after platform fees, refunds and shipping. A pub wants gross margin by wet and dry, and staff cost as a percentage of sales. Off-the-shelf reporting shows all of them a profit and loss with the same twenty lines and answers nobody's question. We agree the four or five numbers that actually decide things in your business, and build the pack around those rather than around the software's default.