Accounting
How to read the Big Three financial statements
A guide to the three most common financial documents and how to read them
Accounting
Data Protection? Mere box-ticking is not the answer.
T-Mobile. TalkTalk. Multi-billion-dollar telecommunications companies that wish they had taken their data protection obligations more seriously. I know from experience that many organisations view regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as burdensome red tape; a ‘box-ticking’ exercise that holds them back from doing business. But, Read more…
Accounting
Our Billing Process
Double-entry accounting should, in some cases, be called ‘double-effort’ accounting. In the case of receivables and payables, that’s true. Each invoice raised by a supplier needs to be entered at the other side by the customer… therefore any efficiency we make in how we raise them should also represent an Read more…
Accounting
Collecting payment from clients on time
When a client fails to pay their invoice on time, what should a small business owner do? Many people find this an uncomfortable position to be in, and often will take a “head in the sand” approach and hope that the problem will go away on its own. Sometimes this Read more…
Accounting
Are your banking arrangements resilient?
We often hear businesses talking about resilience and disaster recovery in terms of IT. What happens if there’s a flood? Will our phones still work? Is our data backed up in the cloud? Is my website hosted separately to my registrar and DNS provider? This is all very important. But Read more…
Accounting
How should business owners pay themselves?
Once your new business is up and running, and revenues are finally coming in, you’ll quite rightly be considering how best to extract your well-earned cash! There are three main ways – salary, dividends, and director’s loan – which I’ll discuss below. SALARYAs director, you can pay yourself a salary Read more…
Accounting
Protecting your company against fraud and passing off
Fraud We’ve all heard about identify theft and associated fraud in our personal lives, with thieves hijacking your identity to take out loans and masquerading as someone else to commit nefarious deeds. Not only can it happen to people, but to businesses too. Obviously, a corporate credit card can be Read more…
Accounting
One share wonders
One of the most common company secretarial tasks we perform (other than the background noise of confirmation statements and dividend vouchers and updating director details) is filing the paperwork with Companies House to do a share split. Many of our clients formed their companies with one share of one pound, Read more…