Eleven services, grouped by how often you will hear about them

How to work out which of these you need

Most businesses do not need eleven accounting services, they need two or three, and which two or three comes down to three facts about you: your trading structure, your VAT position, and whether anybody is on your payroll. Those three answers rule most of this list in or out before anyone has to think about it.

The remaining question is the state of the records. If the bookkeeping is in good order, you are choosing between doing it yourself with the software set up properly and handing the bookkeeping over. If it is not, almost everything else waits behind a clean-up, because a VAT return or a set of accounts built on records that do not agree is confidently wrong rather than usefully right.

You do not have to work this out before ringing. Tell us what you have and where it hurts, and we will tell you what is actually needed and what is not. That includes telling you when the answer is less than you expected.

Why these are grouped by cadence rather than by category

Accountants tend to file services by discipline: tax here, compliance there, advisory somewhere else. That is a useful way to organise a practice and a useless way to help a business owner, because it groups things by who does them rather than by when they land on you.

So they are grouped here by how often you will hear about them. The work that recurs every month or quarter, and therefore has a rhythm you will feel. The work that happens once a year, which is where deadlines and surprises live. And the work you only need when something needs sorting out, which nobody plans for and most people eventually want.

The businesses we actually work with

Tickdoc works with owner-managed limited companies and sole traders, typically from one director up to around twenty employees. Most are in Eastleigh, Southampton and across Hampshire, and some are elsewhere in the UK, because cloud accounting has made location a much smaller question than it used to be.

The sectors we have real experience in are health and social care, construction and the trades, manufacturing, medical and professional training, landlords and property, cleaning, transport and taxi, fitness including martial arts and dance, and charities. Health and social care and construction are the two we would most like to hear from.

That matters more than it sounds. Sector experience is mostly knowing which questions to ask: what a care provider's staffing costs should look like month to month, that a construction business is running CIS and PAYE side by side with different rules, that a landlord's repairs need splitting between what is deductible now and what is not. None of that is exotic, but not knowing to look is how things get missed.

Bookkeeping and accounts support for tax advisers and accountants

Not all of the practice's work is for business owners. Tax advisers, accountants and other practices bring us their own clients' bookkeeping, accounts preparation, software setup and training, and we do the work behind the scenes so the relationship stays theirs.

The most common request is a bookkeeping review: somebody wants a second pair of eyes on a set of records before the accounts are prepared or a return is filed, which is exactly the skill this practice was built on. After that it is catch-up work on a file that has fallen behind, agreeing the control accounts nobody has reconciled, or getting a client onto Xero, QuickBooks or FreeAgent properly so the next year is easier than this one.

It runs the other way too. Where a piece of work needs expertise the practice does not hold, we work with a trusted network of accountants, tax advisers, commercial legal advisers and other professionals, and our engagement letters set out who does what before any work starts.

When we are not the right practice for you

We do not provide audit or advisory work, and we do not take on businesses with complex specialist taxation needs. We will not take on aggressive or unjustifiable tax treatment, and we have turned down work over exactly that. We have also declined a client whose needs were closer to a personal assistant than to an accountant, which was the right call for both of us.

Where something falls outside what we do, we work alongside tax advisers, financial advisers and other accountants, and we would rather point you at somebody who handles it properly than take it on and learn on your file.

Most of these work better together

These are separate services because they are separately priced, not because they are separate jobs. The bookkeeping is what the VAT returns, the management accounts and the year-end accounts are all built on, and the quality of it decides how much each of those costs and how much they are worth.

That is why we would rather quote for the combination than sell you the cheapest single line on the list. It is also why the monthly packages exist, and why they are usually better value than buying the same work piece by piece.