Switching accounting software can feel scary — especially when you’ve got years of invoices, customer balances and a library of bank rules you rely on every month. I’ve helped many small businesses through this kind of migration, and the good news is that with a careful, step‑by‑step...
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Compliance
Auto-enrolment for workplace pensions can feel like a slow-moving compliance...
Financial Planning
I still remember the first time my income vanished for a month. No dramatic...
Bookkeeping
I used to dread bank reconciliation. I’d sit with a cuppa and a growing list...
Tax Tips
When a sole trader incorporates, one of the first and most impactful decisions...
I used to dread bank reconciliation. I’d sit with a cuppa and a growing list of unmatched transactions, wondering how I’d ever stay on top of month‑end without spending hours chasing receipts and coding similar transactions one by one. Then I...
When a sole trader incorporates, one of the first and most impactful decisions is how to split remuneration between salary and dividends. I see business owners agonise over this — partly to minimise tax, partly to keep pension contributions and...
I’ve helped dozens of small businesses recover VAT repayments stuck in HMRC’s system, and I know how frustrating it can feel to wait weeks (or months) for money that’s rightfully yours. Below I share a practical, step‑by‑step approach I...
Hiring your spouse or partner can be a smart way for a microbusiness to stay compliant while making better use of household income — but it only works if the role is genuine and the paperwork is right. Over the years I’ve helped many...
Closing the books for the year as a sole trader with several income streams can feel like juggling flaming torches while standing on a balance beam. I’ve helped many micro-business owners through this process, and the key is to break it down into...
I use Xero Projects every week to check which clients are profitable and which ones quietly erode margins. If you’re like many small business owners I work with, you want clarity without adding admin — not another spreadsheet that needs...
I used to rely on gut feeling to decide whether my clients were about to hit a cash squeeze. Over the years I realised that the most reliable early‑warning signals live in the accounting data we already have — invoices, bank feeds, payroll and...
I plan tax for my clients all year, not just in the run‑up to Self Assessment. That’s because sensible, legal tax minimisation is mostly about timing, structure and making full use of allowances — not about clever (and risky) schemes. Below I...
Keeping VAT, payroll and invoices under control doesn’t have to be a quarterly scramble. Over the years I’ve seen too many small business owners treat bookkeeping as a fire‑fighting exercise — receipts in a shoebox, bank feeds ignored, VAT...
I still remember the first time a client walked into my kitchen-table office clutching an HMRC penalty notice. Their face said panic; their voice said embarrassment. I’ve seen this reaction enough times to know two things: penalties themselves are...