Bookkeeping looks like overhead until the year it costs you something. The companies that struggle at year end are rarely the ones with complicated businesses — they are the ones whose records were assembled in the last fortnight from bank statements and memory.
What good records actually buy you
A shorter, cheaper audit. An audit fee reflects the work required, and reconstructing a year of transactions is work. Records that are current when fieldwork begins are the single biggest factor in what an audit costs and how long it takes.
Tax filings that are not guesses. Your estimated chargeable income is due within three months of your financial year end. If the books are six months behind, that estimate is invented — and you will be correcting it later.
Decisions made on real numbers. Monthly management accounts tell you whether a customer is profitable while you can still do something about it. Annual accounts tell you eleven months too late.
Monthly or annual?
Annual bookkeeping is cheaper and adequate for a dormant company or one with very few transactions. Monthly costs more and gives you a position you can act on.
The honest test is whether you would change a decision based on seeing the numbers sooner. If you would, monthly pays for itself. If you genuinely would not, annual is the right answer and we will say so.
Conventional or cloud
A conventional cycle gives you the position each month once the work is done. A cloud system gives you a live view and lets several people see the same records without emailing files around.
Cloud suits businesses where more than one person needs the numbers, or where invoicing happens continuously. Conventional suits businesses with a steady, predictable transaction pattern. Neither is better in the abstract.
One thing to know before you engage anyone
If we prepare your accounts, we cannot audit them. An auditor reviewing work their own firm produced is reviewing themselves, and that is not an audit. Where we do your bookkeeping, your audit sits with another firm — and we will tell you that at the outset rather than after you have engaged us.