Bookkeeping
Bookkeeping for businesses that need the numbers right
One person, sole charge. I keep the books for owner-managed businesses in London, and remotely for clients across the UK — daily capture through to a VAT return that ties back to something.
The distinction worth making is between books that are right and books that are merely present. Most small businesses have records. Fewer have records where the bank balance, the card settlements and the ledger all agree, where a figure on the VAT return can be traced to the transactions that produced it, and where the owner can ask a question in March and get an answer the same day.
The service
What it covers
Six things, roughly in the order they tend to matter. Most engagements use all of them; some use two.
Daily transaction capture and coding
Purchases, sales, expenses and receipts captured as they happen and coded to the right account first time, with Hubdoc doing the paper — a photograph taken at the till becomes a coded transaction without anyone retyping it. Doing this daily rather than quarterly is not tidiness. A transaction you code on the day is one you still remember; coding a shoebox in January is guesswork in a suit.
Bank feed and batch payment reconciliation
Every line on the bank feed matched to something in the ledger, including the awkward ones. Batch payments are the usual culprit: a card processor sends one credit covering forty transactions less its fees, and the feed shows a single number. Breaking that back out into gross takings, fees and deposit is the point where most small-business reconciliations quietly stop being accurate.
VAT returns, including mixed-rate apportionment
Quarterly returns prepared under Making Tax Digital from records kept for the purpose, rather than reconstructed for the deadline. Mixed-rate supplies get apportioned properly: one supermarket receipt routinely carries standard, zero and reduced-rate items, and treating the whole of it at a single rate is the most common way a VAT position goes wrong without anyone noticing.
Payroll journals, with tips through a liability account
Payroll posted as a journal that ties to the payslips — gross pay, employer NI, pension, net pay and the liabilities that follow. Where staff receive tips, those run through a liability account rather than into revenue. That is not a technicality: money that was never the business's should not appear in the business's turnover, and once it is in there it distorts the margin and every judgement anyone makes from the accounts.
Chart of accounts setup and maintenance
A chart of accounts built around the questions an owner actually asks — which site, which service line, which cost keeps growing — rather than the default list the software shipped with. Then kept from sprawling. An account added in a hurry every time something does not fit is how a chart of accounts turns into an index of past confusion.
POS and card settlement reconciliation
Card settlements reconciled against point-of-sale reports, so gross takings, processor fees and the amount that actually landed in the bank agree with one another. Epos Now and Evo Payments are the two I work with most. Left alone the two records drift — slowly, invisibly, and in a direction nobody checks until it is a year deep.
Who it's for
Owner-managed businesses with staff, volume and mixed takings
Too small for a finance team, too busy for the books to wait until year end. In practice that has meant three kinds of business.
Hospitality
Restaurants and cafés, where volume is high, takings are mixed and the two hard problems are tips and VAT. Tips go through a liability account; mixed-rate supplies get apportioned rather than averaged; card settlements are reconciled against POS reports so the two never quietly separate.
I run the finance function for a UK restaurant and also built its booking system — see the Ostuni booking system case study, the one client where both halves of the practice point at the same business.
Domestic cleaning
Scheduling-driven invoicing, where the work is many small recurring jobs rather than a few large ones, and the records have to stay maintainable from a phone between appointments. The recurring question is subcontractor versus employee treatment, which is expensive to get wrong in either direction.
Set up in QuickBooks Online so the owner can raise an invoice and capture a receipt without going home first.
Elderly care and housekeeping
Payroll-heavy and timesheet-driven, usually with more than one funding source that has to be kept apart rather than averaged into a single figure. The chart of accounts does the work here: care hours and housekeeping sit on separate lines because they behave like two businesses under one name, and the owner needs to be able to read them that way.
How it works
How an engagement runs
Onboarding first. I look at what already exists — the software, the bank feeds, the last set of accounts if there is one — and tell you what I found before I change anything. If the books need catching up, that is a separate piece of work with an end date, not an open-ended retainer.
Then a monthly cadence. What I need from you: read-only bank access or a feed, the receipts (photographed is fine), payroll reports if there is a payroll, and access to the POS if there is one. What you get back: reconciled books, a VAT return in the quarters it falls due, and a short note on anything I found that you ought to know — the person doing the reconciliation is usually the first to notice a supplier quietly raising prices.
The question nobody puts in a contact form: how much of your time this takes. About an hour a month once it is running, most of it spent answering questions about transactions only you can identify.
Scope
What I don't do
Bookkeeping, not accountancy practice. I don't prepare statutory accounts and I don't file tax returns. A good number of bookkeepers are vague about that line; being clear about it costs me some enquiries and saves everybody the ones that were never going to work. If you need those, what I hand your accountant will make their job cheap — and I'm happy to talk through the options. More on how the two halves of the practice fit together.
Tools
What I work in
Xero for most engagements, QuickBooks Online where the client is already there and moving would cost more than it returns.
Start with a conversation
Tell me what state the books are in. The messy version is fine — working out the shape of the problem is part of the job.