Accounts

That’s easy! Just get the following up to date in your software:

1. Enter all of your invoices from suppliers, and send all of your invoices out to your customers.
2. Make sure all of your bank transactions are reconciled.
3. If you have stock, make sure you’ve done a full stock take at the year end. This is essential to have an accurate valuation in the accounts. Some stock may be obsolete, and no longer saleable. If this is the case, break this figure out.
4. Consider whether ‘Work In Progress’ should be accounted for. This is where projects have been started before the year end, but finished afterwards. If this is the case, you’ll need to calculate the percentage of the job that was done at the time of the year end. This percentage is then applied to the costs and income of the job, with the balance being carried into the next year.

We can probably get most of what we’ll need from Xero (or Quickbooks), but the following would be helpful:

1. Copies of all bank statements covering the year end date.
2. Copies of any multi-year agreements for either sales or costs, e.g. leasing documents, loan agreements etc.
3. If not included in the business records, details of any work-in-progress or stocks and the year end.
4. Details of the private element of all business expenses i.e. for motor expenses a mileage log, telephone use etc.
5. A summary of your household utility costs to calculate use of home as office charge, to include the number of rooms in the house excluding kitchens and bathrooms. Include an approximate percentage of time your office is used for business use. (We can help you with this!)
6. If you use your own vehicle for business, the number of business miles completed.
7. We’ll need to adjust for staff holidays that have either been taken in advance or where there are days left to take at the year end. If your year end matches your holiday year and you’ve not agreed to allow any annual entitlement to be carries forward all that’s needed is confirmation that nothing needs adjusting. If your holiday year is not the same as your accounting year we’ll need to know:
   1. Your holiday year end date.
   2. For each employee, their annual holiday entitlement and the number of days they’ve taken at the accounts year end date.

NB: Some of these may not be relevant to your business, and there may be some that are relevant to yours that aren’t listed above. If this is the case, we’ll warn you in advance!

Accounts must be filed at Companies House within nine months of your year end, and if they are late, you’ll incur a penalty. For a private limited company, these range from £150 for filing after the due date but less than one month late, and increase to £1,500 if you file more than six months late.

The penalties double if you file late in two successive years.

You can check the penalty amounts on the gov.uk website.