Accounting built around your industry.

No. The sector pages describe how the same package is applied, not a premium version of it. Fees are based on size and complexity — transaction volume, VAT registration and scheme, payroll headcount, number of entities — and not on the industry label. What the sector genuinely changes is which VAT scheme suits you, how income is recognised, which costs are actually allowable, what your chart of accounts needs to separate, and which numbers are worth watching monthly. What it does not change is the deadlines: HMRC applies the same dates to a hair salon and a software contractor.

Common, and fine. A builder who also lets a property, a consultant who sells an online course, a café with a catering arm. Practically it usually means separate income streams tracked in the accounts so you can see which one actually makes money, and occasionally a partial exemption question on VAT where one activity is exempt and the other is not. Both are dealt with at setup rather than discovered at the year end. Where the activities have genuinely different risk profiles, a second entity may be worth considering — that is a tax and legal conversation, not a bookkeeping one.

For most construction services between VAT-registered businesses within the CIS chain, the customer accounts for the VAT instead of the supplier charging it. The subcontractor invoices without VAT, notes that the reverse charge applies, and the contractor deals with it on their own return. It changed the cash position materially for a lot of subcontractors, because VAT no longer sits in their bank account between quarters — a business that was quietly using it as working capital felt that immediately. It does not apply to end users or to supplies of materials alone, and getting the boundary wrong causes real problems.

Yes. Amazon, Etsy, Shopify, eBay and the card processors all report differently, and each reports net of something — platform fees, refunds, shipping subsidies, advertising, marketplace-collected VAT. Taking the payout figure as revenue understates both turnover and costs, and it is the single most common error we see in e-commerce books. Holding stock in another country through a fulfilment service can also create a VAT registration obligation there, sometimes from the first sale rather than at a threshold. See e-commerce and online retail.

Yes, and no calculator can give you a status. It depends on the reality of the engagement — control over how and when you work, whether a substitute is genuinely permitted, mutuality of obligation, financial risk and how embedded you are in the client's organisation. Medium and large private-sector clients and all public-sector bodies issue a Status Determination Statement, which you can and should challenge if it is wrong. We review the written contract and the actual working practices, which is where determinations are decided. Start with IT and software contractors.

No — the eight pages are the sectors we are asked about most, not a list of who we accept. The compliance work is the same everywhere and the sector-specific part is a handful of things that go wrong in your industry and nowhere else, which we work out at the discovery call. Where we would genuinely hesitate is anything requiring a statutory audit, regulated client money handling, or a specialist regime such as Lloyd's syndicates or charity SORP at scale. Ask, and you will get a straight answer rather than a confident yes.

By working out what actually decides profit in your business, which is rarely the twenty lines on a standard profit and loss. A restaurant lives on gross margin split wet and dry, and staff cost as a percentage of sales. An agency lives on utilisation and revenue per head. A contractor lives on job-level margin and work in progress. An e-commerce business lives on contribution per channel after fees, refunds and shipping. We agree four or five numbers at setup, build the chart of accounts to produce them, and report against those rather than the software's defaults.