What do we do here at Positive Bookkeeping?
Well for starters we are not accountants, we are bookkeepers. Bookkeepers who specialise in looking after landlords, property investors and property developers.
Bookkeeping takes care of all your financial transactions accounting for all your income and expenses.
So, as bookkeepers, we deal with all the above including the day to day transactions, sales invoices, purchase invoices, bank statement transactions. We will reconcile your bank account, prepare and submit your VAT returns. We also provide monthly Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports.
All this means is that by the time a client’s accountant gets involved we will have fully reconciled the bank accounts for the financial year, making sure that all incomings and outgoings for that year in the bookkeeping software package we use matches what the bank accounts say.
Your accountant could do your bookkeeping for you although a lot of accountants prefer not to as their main area of expertise is normally in tax planning, keeping up to date with legislation and ensuring timely submission to HMRC.
Accountants will normally charge you the same rate per hour whether they are doing your bookkeeping or your year-end accounts whereas a bookkeeper’s fees are, or should be, less than those of an accountant.
A bookkeeper’s costs for the year are often almost wiped out by the tax savings they discover for their clients.
How do we achieve this in practical terms?
Systems
At Positive Bookkeeping the systems we use range from a simple spreadsheet up to specialist online software packages like Xero and Quickbooks. Some of our clients are at the beginning of their property investment journey so a simple spreadsheet will suffice until they need to upgrade to an online package.
We prefer to use a software package called Xero and encourage our clients to do the same. Xero comes in various pricing levels starting at £10 per month and so is easily affordable for small businesses.
Xero allows you to link to your bank account and feed your bank account transactions directly into Xero.
By using online ‘cloud based’ systems means that it doesn’t matter where you are in the country sharing documents etc is just a click away.
Your Receipts & Invoices
So here you are, armed with (in some cases) a plastic carrier bag full of folded, creased and fading receipts and invoices. Or maybe you are slightly more organised and have all your paperwork in a concertina file or similar.
You could present yourself and your plastic bag at your accountant’s office and give him or her 2 weeks’ notice to get everything in order for your year end deadline, (own up, who’s done this before?), but we advise a more sensible, systemised approach.
As we do with Xero, we advise all of our clients to use Dropbox which is an online application that allows you so synchronise your files across multiple devices and so share your files with other users.
Dropbox is available for PC and Mac and on Apple, Windows and Android devices.
So, all our clients have a Dropbox folder and they save all their receipts and invoices there and share it with us so we can access them. It’s simple to scan or take a photo of your invoices and save them in Dropbox.
We can then upload those receipts to Xero and associate them with the associated bank account transaction, keeping a copy of the receipts in Dropbox where they can’t get lost or faded.
We suggest our clients keep the originals in case they need them in the future.
Ongoing
We at Positive Bookkeeping can either take over the role of bookkeeper for you or we can train you how to do it yourself either on your premises or ours.
We can provide you with Profit & Loss and Balance Sheet reports as and when you need them and our friendly team are always available to during business hours to answer any questions you may have.
We offer a free 30 minute Skype or phone call where we ask you where you are in your business now and where you would like to be going forward.
Click here to contact us to book a free call or call us on 0121 740 0132
Positive Bookkeeping Ltd – Looking after the business owner
