Services

Strategy and Planning | Owner Support | Grooming for Sale | Management Information | "Compliance"

Introduction

Our range of services is designed to help you develop your business and achieve your ambitions and goals.

We are able to add value to your business, because we have helped many other businesses to be built up and sold over the last thirty years. We have seen success in action.

In particular, Michael Warner has the personal experience of having successfully developed and sold his first accountancy practice.

Strategy and Planning

In order to succeed, you need a clear vision of where you are headed. As businesses develop, their internal sources of information grow with them. These include financial performance trends and product portfolio performance and provide the building blocks for effective business strategy.

The elements of a business strategy can be summarised as follows:

Where are we Now?
Where do we want to get to?
How do we get there?

It is a fact that the majority of private businesses do not have a business plan. If they do have one, it is quite often out of date and gathering dust on some forgotten shelf.

We can take the pain out of preparing a business plan. We can help you to produce a working document on just one page, which covers the feature listed above and includes - most importantly of all - an Action Plan. This One Page Plan will be created in a Word template and will become an integral element of your business management. For many businesses, they are included as one of the papers attached to the agendas for monthly Board meetings.

To set the strategy planning in motion, we can facilitate a "day out of the office". We will use a range of business planning tools to help you to formulate your strategy and create your first One Page Plan.

If required, we can then attend your Board meetings and assist you in the maintenance of your plan and the achievement of your objectives.

It's been said before, but it's true and it's worth saying again…………………..

" A failure to plan is a plan for failure"

Owner Support

For many business owners, life can be lonely and stressful. You may be the only shareholder in the company, or the sole proprietor. All your employees look to you to resolve problems as they arise. For instance, if cash flow is a concern, you may be reluctant to discuss it with anyone in the business. This is an unhealthy situation for both you and the business.

We provide a mentoring and support service on a retainer basis. Calls and emails are unrestricted and can be dealt with out-of-hours. Ad hoc meetings can also be built into the arrangement.

Grooming for Sale

A business needs to be ready for sale at all times, because it is not always possible to plan ahead for this event.

Sometimes, the ill health of either the proprietor, or a family member can precipitate the need to dispose of the business. Or, perhaps, an approach comes out of the blue and an excellent offer is made, subject to an independent investigation of the records.

Your business should therefore be shipshape at all times, so that the maximum value can be achieved and that the offer is not reduced as a result of the investigation being unsatisfactory.

Please refer to our articles section, The Business Journey for an article about the issues, which need to be addressed and which we can help you to resolve.

Management Information

In order to run your business successfully, you have to have financial information, which is accurate and on time. But, above all, it must be in a format that you find easy to understand.

We will review your accounting arrangements and make suggestions for improvements. Apart from enhancing the quality of information being produced by your bookkeeper, or internal accountant, our suggestions are likely to reduce the amount of work we need to do on the year-end accounts. The cost of this system review is therefore recouped very quickly.

Even if the quality and accuracy of the financial information may then be higher, unfortunately, for many people the reports still remain just a blur of numbers! We can resolve this, by setting up graphical formats of your monthly or annual accounts; these formats will help you to manage your business more successfully.

The colour charts and graphs will clearly show the key trends and give you warning signals of any decline in profit performance, or cash flow.

"Compliance"

This is the area of traditional services, which have always been provided by firms of accountants, because most businesses do not employ an internal accountant, who has sufficient experience to carry out this compliance work himself or herself.

"Compliance" essentially means those activities, which need to be dealt with to ensure that a business is not in breach of laws and regulations. They include: -

Preparation of annual accounts
Completion of tax and VAT returns and the agreement of tax liabilities
Company Secretarial work

We can handle all these important responsibilities for you.

However, we do not carry out audits. This is because the value we can bring to your business will be best achieved by working closely with you, as part of your team. To act as your auditor would require us to be independent of you and this would run counter to the benefits of our close working relationship.

For most private companies, an audit is now voluntary. In respect of accounting periods ending after 30th March 2004, an audit is not required by law, unless your company's annual turnover exceeds £5.6m. We have summarised the pros and cons of voluntarily continuing to have an audit in The Business Journey section.

As part of our service, we can guide you in selecting an audit firm and negotiate the audit fee, on your behalf. As we have a wealth of experience in carrying out audits, we can also ensure that the Audit File is comprehensively prepared for the selected auditor, in order to minimise the amount of time spent by them.