Hi Everyone. I've got a couple of questions.. I have been approached by a couple of people who want me to do their books and payroll for them, once I am qualified, regulated and insured. At the moment they have accountants doing all of this. One girl in particular is running a very successful beauty shop and gives everything to the accountant in a big bag every month and he goes from there. she has no understanding of bookkeeping at all and wants someone to do everything for her. She wants me to do it once qualified but doesn't understand the difference between accountant and bookkeeper. She has been asking me to do her tax return as well, she is a sole trader and does self assessment so technically I could once I pass the SA exam with ICB, but she wants to know about tax avoidance etc and I'm not qualified to give any advice on any tax matters. What I want to know is the following. If I do her payroll, and all book keeping and vat returns etc up to the point of her tax return , is it easy enough to pass this on to a qualified accountant then to process the return and is she going to be better off by doing this. How does everyone else pass on work? Do you find a good accountant to work with and pass it on yourself and then invoice the customer yourself for the whole amount ( and pay the accountant out of this) or does the customer have to find her own accountant and pay seperately.. I don't know any qualified accountants you see so I'm not sure what to do. and I think I may come across this more and more. I'm wondering if I should look around and try and find a good accountant that I could work in conjunction with to pass work to and hopefully vica versa but don't know how feasable this is. Any help appreciated. many thanks Annemarie
All of my clients already had accountants, if its on QB or Sage then I do a back up or print reports which ever the accountant wants and then either take it all ot the accountant or give it to the client to take to the accountant. It works fine this way for me. You will get to know the accountants and know how they want things. The accountant probably charges her alot more for doing the carry bag of receipts, which is why she will be better off with a bookkeeper who dosen't charge as much. Then at the year end pass it all over to the accountant.
I agree with Anne-Marie, the only problem is getting the opening balances from the Accountant when they have finished, for some reason they do not like passing it on.
