Running a small business means wearing too many hats.

You get a fixed monthly figure in writing after a 30-minute discovery call. It is priced on transaction volume, VAT registration and scheme, payroll headcount, the number of entities and the state of the records — not on your industry or your turnover in isolation. A £400,000 consultancy with twelve invoices a month is less work than a £150,000 shop with daily takings and stock, which is exactly why a published price would mislead one of them. The fee is fixed once agreed, includes FreeAgent worth up to £330 a year, and carries no hourly charge for questions.

When you start making decisions that cannot wait for the annual accounts — hiring, pricing, borrowing, taking on premises or stock. Year-end accounts arrive months after the period they describe and are built for HMRC and Companies House, not for you. Once there are people to pay and cash to time, you want monthly or quarterly management accounts and a rolling cash forecast. The honest counterweight: if you are a one-person business with predictable income and no staff, reporting monthly is a cost without a payoff, and we will tell you that rather than sell it.

A named accountant who knows the business, with a team behind them so the work does not stop when one person is on holiday. That structure is deliberate: a single-person relationship is lovely until it is the week of your VAT deadline and they are ill. Production runs in small pods where a senior reviews what a producer prepares, which is how errors get caught before they reach you rather than after they reach HMRC. You are not explaining your business from scratch every time you ring. See the team.

The recurring compliance work: bookkeeping, VAT, payroll at the agreed headcount, year-end accounts, the tax return and Companies House filings, all listed line by line in your proposal. Outside it: catch-up work on unfiled years, HMRC enquiries, restructures, valuations, audits, and regulated financial or legal advice. Those are quoted when they arise so you are not paying monthly for something you may need once in five years. Advisory work — management accounts, forecasting, planning and coaching — is deliberately separate too, because plenty of businesses genuinely do not need it yet and should not be bundled into paying for it.

Yes, and the growth points are the bits worth planning for. VAT registration is compulsory once taxable turnover passes £90,000 on a rolling twelve-month basis, or when you expect to pass it within thirty days — the rolling test is what catches people, because it is not your accounting year. Payroll brings RTI submissions every pay run, auto-enrolment assessment, and pension duties that carry their own penalties. Both are cheaper to set up before you need them than to backdate afterwards, and registering for VAT late can mean paying HMRC tax you never charged your customers.

Yes, and we would rather have that conversation early. The usual signs are a finance job that has quietly become someone's second full-time role, a bank balance nobody trusts as a guide to what is spendable, or decisions being made on last year's figures. At that point the answer is either a Virtual Finance Team level or your own bookkeeper with us handling month-end and compliance on top. For most businesses under about £2m of turnover, outsourcing is cheaper for the same output; above that it becomes a genuine judgement call and we will say so.

We time the handover around your cycles rather than the calendar. Practically: professional clearance and records requested from your current accountant, HMRC agent authorisation put in place, software and bank feeds set up, then a switch-over date chosen so no VAT return or pay run falls in the gap. Year-to-date payroll figures come across so nothing is double-counted or lost. Most handovers complete within a couple of weeks, and the hold-up is nearly always the outgoing firm's reply. You do not have to have the awkward conversation — the clearance letter is ours to send.

That is fine, and it changes the pricing and the tax position rather than the service. Each entity needs its own accounts, return and filings, so the fee reflects the number of entities, not one blended figure. On tax, the point people miss is associated companies: the £50,000 and £250,000 Corporation Tax thresholds are divided between them, so two companies each making £40,000 do not both get the small profits rate. Intercompany balances, recharges and any group VAT registration all need deliberate treatment. Bring the whole structure to the discovery call, not just the trading company.