Accurate numbers, tighter control over cash, reliable reporting, and senior expertise in the decisions that matter — without recruiting and managing an outsourced finance department of your own.
Accurate, current records · better control over cash · reliable monthly reporting · cover across the finance function · senior support for big decisions
A finance function for growing businesses that need more than a bookkeeper but are not ready to build a full internal finance department.
Nobody sets out to build a finance function. It accumulates — every new customer, supplier, employee and account adds a small weekly job, none big enough to justify a hire.
So it gets spread around: the owner, an administrator who sat closest to it, a bookkeeper who sees the records monthly, an accountant who sees them yearly. Everybody handles part of it. Nobody owns it.
Then the books fall behind. Cash becomes unpredictable, because nobody watches money in against money committed out. Invoices get chased when somebody remembers, suppliers get paid reactively, and reports arrive too late to change anything — so decisions get made off the bank balance. And one person becomes a single point of failure.
A finance director should not be processing receipts, and a bookkeeper should not be expected to provide board-level financial leadership. Most finance trouble comes from that mismatch.
An internal department fixes it with structure: junior people handle volume, a manager controls the close, somebody senior interprets the results. You cannot buy a third of a finance director.
So you get the structure without the headcount — three roles in one outsourced finance team, same records, same timetable. Not three products, and not a choice.
Keeping the day-to-day finance operation moving.
Records stay current, routine work gets done, and the owner stops carrying finance admin.
Controlling the close, compliance and reporting process.
Your outsourced finance manager gives you reliable numbers, deadlines known early, and control over the figures everything rests on.
Turning the numbers into better business decisions.
Your virtual finance director tells you what is happening, what is likely next, and what to decide now.
Very few businesses arrive with nothing in place. Somebody is usually doing something, often well. The question is which parts are failing.
Buzz operates the day-to-day processes, compliance, reporting and planning. Best for businesses with no internal finance team, where the work lands on people hired for something else.
You keep an administrator or bookkeeper; Buzz handles month-end, compliance, reporting and senior support. Best where somebody already knows your customers and processes: they stay, the technical work does not.
Your team processes the work competently, but reporting is thin, forecasting absent and nobody senior challenges the numbers. We add the management and director layer above them.
We build the team around the gaps in your current finance function. We do not replace good people to increase the scope of our fee.
Outsourced finance fails on the boundary more often than on the work. Two people each assume the other is chasing the invoice, and nobody does.
So the split is explicit and the final scope is agreed in writing. A responsibility that exists only in a conversation is not one.
One boundary deserves stating plainly. We do not control your bank account and we do not authorise payments. We prepare the payment run; you approve and release it, and you keep banking authority.
A finance function is not a series of favours. It is a repeating cycle, and its value comes from the repetition.
Onboarding comes first, and it is deliberately unglamorous: review the records, assess the bookkeeping honestly, check the bank feeds, find the backlogs nobody has mentioned, rebuild the chart of accounts, agree responsibilities and approval processes, then set the reporting timetable.
The exact rhythm is agreed before the service begins, so both teams know what good looks like.
We do not publish a universal service-level guarantee, because one set of turnaround times applied to every client would be marketing rather than a commitment.
Reliability comes from specificity. Being "responsive" means nothing with a VAT deadline nine days away; a schedule saying who does what, by when, means a great deal.
Scope, timetable and responsibilities are documented during onboarding and reviewed as the business changes.
A figure you disagree with starts a conversation about the business, not the data.
Invoices raised promptly, debts chased to a schedule, tight weeks seen coming.
A hiring or pricing question takes an afternoon, not a fortnight.
Finance admin stops being the job you do on Sunday evening.
Holidays, illness and resignations are covered by documented processes.
Scope moves with the business, not fixed by a hire made two years ago.
Both are illustrative. Neither is a client and every figure is invented — they are here because "better financial management" means little until the arithmetic is done once.
A business invoicing £480,000 a year bills about £1,315 of sales a day. At an average 62 days to pay, this sits permanently in the debtor book.
That £42,082 is not extra profit and not a cost saving. It is money already earned, arriving sooner: a business does not need more profit to be better funded, it needs its own money back. VAT, also in the debtor book, makes it larger.
Releasing it is unglamorous work: invoice the day the job finishes, state terms and the consequence of missing them, chase overdue balances to a schedule, plan supplier payments.
Same business, weighing an operations coordinator on £32,000. The owner's mental figure is £2,667 a month. The Finance Office makes the question answerable at all, because revenue, margin and the existing team's cost are facts. The Finance Manager builds the true monthly cost.
So £3,184 a month, not £2,667 — £6,210 a year more than the owner assumed. Not a reason to abandon the hire; a reason to stop budgeting from the salary line.
The Finance Director puts it in the forecast beside the VAT, PAYE and Corporation Tax landing in the same months. Here the examples meet: the £42,082 released by cutting debtor days from 62 to 30 covers £3,184 a month for thirteen months. The hire becomes affordable because the credit control got fixed first — that is the benefit of the right expertise connected across one team.
A real decision with a real answer on both sides, so it is worth setting out honestly.
We will not tell you outsourcing is always cheaper, because it is not. What does hold is this: for many growing businesses, outsourcing provides broader capability and better continuity than the business could justify recruiting internally at the same stage.
As the company grows, an internal finance team may eventually be right — and we should be the ones to tell you.
Buzz has two flagship services and they get confused, which is our fault rather than yours.
Buzz Business Pulse plans, reports, reviews and advises: annual budget, rolling cashflow forecast, management accounts and a regular advisory meeting. You, or your bookkeeper, keep operating the day-to-day processes underneath it. Buzz Virtual Finance Team operates the finance function itself, then adds the management and director layer on top.
Month-end ownership on Business Pulse sits with the client or with Buzz Accounting as agreed. "Available" means scoped in or out, not bundled.
Choose Business Pulse when the finance processes already work and you need better planning, reporting and decisions. Choose Virtual Finance Team when you need Buzz to operate some or all of the finance function. If the bookkeeping is behind, start here.
There is rarely one trigger — usually a run of months where the work has been late, the reporting thin and somebody quietly stretched.
It is a substantial service, priced accordingly, so there is no sense selling it to a business that gains nothing.
If that is you, one of the Buzz accountancy packages covers it, and Business Pulse is the right addition once the decisions get bigger. Neither is a lesser choice.
One failure mode is worth naming before you buy. The service will not work where a client consistently withholds information, will not use the agreed systems, or ignores the agreed approval processes. If receipts stay in the van, no finance function produces reliable numbers.
Not what the systems say should happen. What is happening now.
We map who does the finance work and how long it takes, plus the processes, systems, deadlines and problems.
We agree what Buzz owns, what stays with you, and how the two teams work together — including what has to reach us, and when.
We set up or improve the accounting platform, document flow, payment approvals, credit control and reporting, so data arrives rather than being fetched — the usual friction in outsourced bookkeeping and finance.
We work through backlogs, reconcile the accounts, establish the rhythm, then say plainly when the reporting can be relied upon.
We will not produce confident-looking reports from numbers we do not trust. Reliable reporting starts with reliable records.
A fixed monthly fee based on the work and the responsibility involved. Not a day rate, not an hourly rate, and not a number that moves because a month was busy.
There is no price list here, and publishing one would be dishonest. Two businesses on identical turnover can generate completely different finance work: one invoices twelve customers a month, the other takes four hundred card payments a day. What we can be transparent about is how the fee is built.
The last two matter: current records cost less to take on than a business two years behind. Clean-up is quoted separately as a one-off.
Scope and monthly fee are confirmed in writing before any work begins. If the scope changes, the fee is revisited in the same direction.
Start with a discovery call. We map your finance function, identify the gaps and recommend the right mix of Finance Office, Manager and Director support.
We are not putting invented case studies or borrowed testimonials here. What we can show you is who does the work.
More than twenty years in accountancy, and he built his own firm organically to a substantial recurring fee base. He sets the quality bar for our financial work.
One of the senior accountants in the production team, reviewing and delivering client accounts and tax work, and making sure it is right first time.
Janet combines accounts work with payroll: the pay runs, RTI submissions and auto-enrolment duties that must be right every month.
Tony McClements, Rochelle and Mary complete the production team, and Andy Jackson leads the systems behind it.
No. Bookkeeping is one part. An outsourced finance function also controls the numbers — month-end close, compliance, controls, management accounts — then interprets them through budgeting, forecasting and decision support.
No. They are roles in one team, not packages bought together. Some clients take the Finance Office and Manager only; others process well in-house and want the senior layers.
Usually not. In the shared model your bookkeeper keeps daily entry, invoicing and customer contact while we handle month-end, compliance, reporting and senior support.
Business Pulse plans, reports, reviews and advises, while you or your bookkeeper keep operating the day-to-day processes. The Virtual Finance Team operates the agreed finance function itself — bookkeeping through to month-end close — and can add reporting and director support on top.
A fixed monthly fee agreed in writing before work begins, based on the work involved rather than your turnover — transaction volume, bank accounts, purchase invoices, credit control, payroll headcount, entities and reporting complexity.
Not always, and we will not claim it is. Compare the full cost of a hire — Employer's National Insurance, pension, software, equipment, recruitment, holiday and sickness cover — not the salary; see what a new hire actually costs. For many growing businesses, outsourcing gives broader capability and better continuity than recruiting internally could.
Named people, not a ticketing system. Your service schedule lists the key contacts and the escalation route, and because it is a team somebody who knows your business is always available.
Usually Xero — we are a Xero Gold Partner — with receipt-capture and payment tools alongside. FreeAgent suits smaller engagements and is included in Buzz packages; QuickBooks and Sage are supported.
Expect a month or two before the reporting can be relied upon, longer with a real backlog. Review and scoping first, then systems and controls, then backlogs and reconciliations.
Yes, and many clients do — that is the shared model. We build around the gaps rather than replacing good people, and the split is written down.
Scope, timetable and responsibilities are reviewed as the business changes — new staff, another entity, a customer on ninety-day terms. The fee moves with it, in either direction. And if you leave, you take everything: the accounting file, the underlying records and any reporting we have built.
No. We prepare scheduled payment runs for you to approve and release, and you normally retain banking authority. The approval step stays inside the business.
