Freelance Bookkeeper Tunbridge Wells :: Fenella Cubbon

Registering for Vat online

admin — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:56:25 +0000

All small businesses with a turnover of more than £100,000 must now register to pay Vat online. I have now completed this for one of my clients. It is straightforward to do online and the instructions from HM Revenue and Customs are particularly good. The only things that could go wrong are the client not noticing the arrival of the sealed authorisation code which will be posted to them! Also the client is acknowledging that the company will be able to pay by Direct Debit the full amount owed every three months. There must be some companies whose cash flow is not perfect and for whom this could be a problem.

Year End

admin — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 18:07:36 +0000

My year end on one of my clients is 31st December. This is the yearly date their company chooses to produce the yearly Profit and Loss and Balance Sheet. These are usually done by a firm of chartered accountants. The Profit and Loss statement requires the total sales for the past year, the stock (goods that are going to be sold) at the end of the year less the stock at the start of the year. So I will be getting together a stock figure for our stock held at the end of the year (31st Dec 09). I will also draw up a list of creditors – people we owe money to at the end of the year, including what we owe to the government in VAT (Value Added Tax). The VAT rate goes up on 1st Jan 10 to 17.5% so I will be changing all the percentages on my simple spreadsheet to reflect this.

It seems easy to draw together year end information, but less easy to decide what information is useful to help the company make more money, or be more green etc. My client loves to see a comparison of weekly sales against the same week the year before. But there must be more or other information that would be useful. Perhaps the old fallbacks of margins, gross and net profit should be calculated each week. Cash flow is another piece of information that is essential. Cash flow for a small business means literally the money the company has in its current account to pay bills or to invest if there is a profit. Money from sales will come in to the current account and go out as well. Keeping a grip on this flow of money is essential for small businesses and is know as its cash flow.

Incomplete records

admin — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:11:24 +0000

I am interested in how to deal with incomplete records. One of my clients, a small fast food retailer, had an oven fire and we think last years records may have been water logged. Most of the record of cash payments were on a spreadsheet saved onto several different computers. But we will have lost that primary input document and a lot of invoices.

Hello. This site is offering bookkeeping services to smaller companies in the Tunbridge Wells area

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:21:17 +0000