A New Year feels like a good time to reflect on your business and make a fresh start with aspects that are not working as well as they could be.
Outsourcing work that you know can be done better by someone else is a good start.
We receive more enquiries in January for bookkeeping support than we do in other months of the year, although September (another time that feels like a new year) comes a close second. However it doesn't just have to be January and September that you outsource your bookkeeping, or even your payroll as we take on new businesses throughout the year. April is a popular time for outsourcing payroll as it is the start of a new tax year.
Bookkeeping is easily outsourced with online software for receiving and processing documents and recording accounting transactions. But,of course, bookkeeping is far more than processing documents. Businesses need a bookkeeper who does more than just data entry. Being organised, and reviewing and understanding the effect the transactions are having on the accounts to ensure the recording is correct is important. Understanding VAT is too, whether your business is straightforward or whether there are VAT complexities such as partial exemption or overseas sales. Most businesses, though not all, like regular reports, monthly or quarterly, so they can see how their business is doing often with comparisons to previous years so they can see the changes in income and expenses over time.
Our bookkeeping team support businesses with the bookkeeping function they need for their business. Whether that is just the basics of keeping records up to date for the accountant to produce accurate end of year accounts, or whether it is more involved with monthly or quarterly VAT returns, bespoke management reports or supplier payments.
The other aspect of your business to consider outsourcing is payroll. Payroll seems to become more and more involved these days and passing that complexity to us will give you peace of mind. We deal with many different types of employers who may have 1 or more than 50 employees and therefore we regularly experience the issues that you may come across just once a year or with even less frequently than that. Whilst payroll software can do your payroll for you, as with anything, the output is only as good as the input. So if you don't know how to do it you won't know whether you have the correct result. Pension auto enrolment is the area of payroll in which we find most errors when we take on new payrolls because it usually hasn't been set up correctly.
If you are considering outsourcing your bookkeeping and payroll we will certainly give you peace of mind and our experienced team will ensure that it will be done efficiently and accurately.
Whilst we don't outsource our own bookkeeping and payroll for obvious reasons there are aspects of our business that we do outsource because we know they are far better done by those with experience than trying to do it ourselves.
So if you are thinking about making some changes this New Year give us a call and see whether we can help you.
