As your business grows, so does the workload — more transactions, more complexity, more pressure on cash, and more decisions that need good data behind them. A Buzz Virtual Finance Team bridges that gap at whatever level you need it.
We keep the numbers organised — bookkeeping, reconciliations, payroll, expenses and VAT. We improve visibility with reporting, dashboards and clear cashflow visibility. And we support the decisions that matter, with daily finance support, planning and board reporting.
Real-time financial data at your fingertips, with the day-to-day bookkeeping and reconciliation kept on top of.
Effortless compliance and precise reporting, layered on top of everything in the Virtual Finance Office.
Strategic advice and support to fuel growth, with a director-level view of the numbers behind every decision.
If you're scaling operations, need better financial visibility, want tighter control of cash, or need reporting that actually supports decisions — without hiring an in-house finance team — this is built for you.
Most businesses start at the level below where they think they are, because clean data has to come before useful reporting. You can move up at any point — and down again if the need passes.
Current records reviewed, feeds and integrations checked, the chart of accounts rebuilt if it isn't telling you anything, and the backlog quantified honestly rather than optimistically.
Bank and card feeds, receipt capture, supplier payment runs and credit control automation, so data arrives rather than being fetched.
Reconciliation, purchase invoices processed, a payment run prepared for you to approve, and overdue customers chased on a schedule instead of when someone remembers.
A month-end close to an agreed timetable, management accounts with commentary that says what changed and why, and a rolling cash forecast updated with real figures.
A proper sit-down: performance against budget, what the forecast says about the next two quarters, and the decisions that need making now rather than later.
Illustrative figures for a £480,000-turnover business. Not a client, and not a projection for yours.
A business invoicing £480,000 a year is billing about £1,315 a day. If customers take an average of 62 days to pay, the amount permanently tied up in the debtor book looks like this.
That is not extra profit — it is your own money arriving sooner, and for most growing businesses it is worth more than another month of sales. Getting it takes unglamorous work: invoicing on the day the job finishes rather than at month end, terms that state interest on late payment, and someone chasing to a schedule. That is the Level 1 job. Level 3 is the one that tells you, before you commit, whether hiring a £35,000 salary in September works on the forecast or breaks it in February.
A fixed monthly fee agreed in writing before anything starts, priced by the level you take and the volume behind it — transactions, invoices, payroll headcount, number of entities and how many bank and platform feeds need reconciling. Level 1 is bookkeeping and reconciliation; Level 2 adds payroll, VAT, accounts and tax; Level 3 adds management accounts, forecasting and director-level input. You get the figure at the discovery call. Moving between levels is a conversation and takes effect from the next billing cycle, in both directions — the point is that it tracks what you actually need.
A bookkeeper records what happened. The three levels here cover recording, compliance and interpretation, with the seniority matched to the task rather than to one person's job title — so a director-level review of the numbers does not depend on the same person who codes the receipts. You also get cover: holidays, illness and resignations are our problem, not yours, which is the risk most owners underestimate until the person who knows the system leaves in the week of a VAT deadline.
Compare it with the full cost of the hire, not the salary. Employer's National Insurance, pension contributions, software licences, equipment, recruitment fees, holiday and sickness cover and management time all sit on top — see what a new hire actually costs. For most businesses under roughly £2m of turnover, outsourcing delivers the same output for less. Above that it becomes a genuine judgement call, because volume starts to justify a dedicated person and the co-ordination cost of an external team rises. We will say when you have reached that point rather than keep the retainer running.
Not necessarily, and often that is the wrong answer. Plenty of engagements keep an in-house bookkeeper doing daily entry, invoicing and credit control, with us handling month-end close, compliance and reporting on top. That is frequently the cheapest sensible arrangement: the person who knows your customers stays, and the technical work they were never trained for stops landing on them. Where we do replace someone, it is usually because the role has quietly grown into three jobs and nobody was doing any of them properly, and that is a conversation to have openly rather than by stealth.
Usually Xero, paired with capture and payment tools such as Apron or Dext — we are a Xero Gold Partner. FreeAgent works well for smaller engagements and is included in Buzz packages at no extra cost. QuickBooks and Sage are supported too. What matters more than the platform is the app stack around it: bank feeds, receipt capture, payment approval and, where relevant, the till or e-commerce integration. A tidy Xero file with no receipt capture still generates the same monthly chase for paperwork, which is where most of the friction actually lives.
Expect a month or two. Weeks one and two are spent finding out what is actually there: records reviewed, feeds and integrations checked, the chart of accounts rebuilt if it is not telling you anything, and the backlog quantified honestly rather than optimistically. The first close after a handover almost always turns something up — an unreconciled account, VAT coded inconsistently, stock never counted, a suspense balance nobody can explain. We fix that before producing a tidy report from figures we do not trust, because a confident report built on bad data is worse than a late one.
You can cancel at any time; service continues through the billing period already paid for, and fees are non-refundable except as required by law. What you take with you is everything: the accounting file, the underlying records, reconciliations and any reporting we have built. We will not hold data over a disputed invoice. The failure mode worth naming up front is a business that wants the reporting but will not change the input habits — receipts still in the van, sales data still in someone's head — because no finance function, internal or external, produces reliable numbers from that.
