I am hoping you will be able to give me some general advice.
I am a CIMA accountant, qualified in 2008 and been working in a management accounting/commercial role for 9 years.
I am looking at the potential of setting up in practice and I was wondering what your advice would be for training etc as I know that my current experience is not in this area.
I am confident I can do the work but I am not sure what would be expected from me in practice and also what I would need to do to enable me to work in practice.
I am happy to do some courses that would help me out with this but again not sure what would be the best course to do.
I'm part qualified CIMA from decades ago, and started my previous business in 1988 after 12 years experience in industry. For my main clients I was effectively their management accountant, doing pretty much what I had done in my proper jobs, but on a smaller scale for companies that couldn't afford to employ a full time accountant.
I did a bit of book-keeping, but mostly trained my client's staff to do it, and I did the financial and management accounts including some of the year end accounts preparation. The year end accounts and tax were then completed either by a firm of accountants, or my tame accountant I recommended to them (although he wasn't that tame if he disagreed with anything I'd done!). So it was like working part time for various companies, but with the advantage of working from home and doing things my way!
Maybe there's a niche for you doing more or less what you do now, but for a number of clients. Then most of what you need to learn is how to run your business, not how to do the job. And learning all the quirks of small companies that don't have the organisation and discipline of bigger ones of course!
whilst I keep finding myself giving management accounts as a value added to clients I've not been able to actually sell that as a seperate service. Wish that I could as like yourselves my backgrounds on that side of the fence (but I'm not CIMA).
I've attempted pushing management information and in a couple of cases have helped clients by guiding them past their misconceptions ablout their businesses but I keep hitting the issue with small businesses that their owners don't want helping (or more to the point don't want to pay for it and don't want to listen) which is totally at odds with the attitude of the serious sized businesses that I'm used to.
I'm very interested to know how you would market that as it seems far easier to sell services on the basis of legal compliance than improving performance.
Hi Nikki,
I think that the main question in your post is what work would you be expected to do for clients.
The other question that you should be asking is how do I find the clients.
I've got other stuff that I need to do but if nobody has filled out those answers when I get back I'll write a fuller answer and maybe a few links to similar questions and answers on my return.
Good to have you on board and talk in a bit,
kind regards,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
what do I need to do to ensure I am trained up to the correct standard and
what do I need to do with CIMA to ensure I am doing things correctly
I know I will need to understand how to get clients but at the moment I an focusing on how I go about starting everything off!!
I am hoping to set myself up soon and then slowly work my way into getting a couple of clients so that my switch from working to self employed isnt too scary!! (I only work 3 days a week at the moment but Im on London wages so it would be a big drop to go to nothing!!)
If you are aiming to be an accountant in general practice, your core services would be bookkeeping, payroll, preparing annual accounts and various types of tax returns. I am not in practice myself, but others on this forum who are may be able to provide a more complete answer on this.
You need to make sure that you are up to date with current accounting standards, new ones have been introduced recently substantially replacing what was in place before.
You would need to refresh your tax knowledge, get the current CIMA tax textbook, the IFA tax textbook or ATT tax textbooks.
You could also try the ACCA paper P6 tax textbook... I get the Kaplan version every year. Its really good... And really heavy so if you have to kill someone with a book go for that one.
Alternatively try the smaller but more expensive Taxation by Alan Melville. Its lower level tax knowledge but possibly one of the best annual tax books in the market.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Working in practice is very different to working as an employee. Suddenly you are the Marketing, Facilities, IT and Sales department as well as doing the work!
