Wowcher/groupon book keeping course

Jm90

Hi all, my husband has recently started up as a ltd company, at the moment we plan to pay someone to do the book keeping side of things, as I feel I don't really understand when it comes down to the tax and vat, filling in the forms itself looks very daunting.

We thought pay an accountant for the first year so I don't have to worry about making any mistakes.

However as I said, i don't really have a clue but I have just under a year to learn.
Ive been looking at little online courses, but the are so many I don't know what to go for. There are ones just for booking or book keeping & payroll... the aim is to learn both.

A few came up as being on offer via wowcher and groupon. Do you Think these courses would be good enough to show me the basics? If so which one as there are loads of different ones available.

Has anyone done this before. Please help.

Thanks

paddyrg

Basic bookkeeping is painfully simple - you write down what you spend and earn in a spreadsheet or workbook (in WHSmith business stationery section there are books which walk you through by filling in blanks).

Year end accounts are genuinely complicated by comparison, and almost everyone pays a proper accountant to do that.

Pennywise

Basic book-keeping courses won't teach you anywhere near enough about tax and tax returns.

Book-keeping and accountancy are two very different disciplines.

Jm90

Hi there thank you, well I thought it was basically as you suggested, which I am happy to do.

I downloaded diy accounting so I think it was the spreadsheets with so much to fill in, looked confusing to me even with the guidance sheet.

Only reason I asked about the courses is because I thought if it was simple enough but it's me struggling to 'get it' maybe they would help.

Jm90

We’re offering you an online HR and payroll and accounting and bookkeeping course bundle

Today's course deal gives you the chance to explore an exciting new career in human resources and payroll management, as well as gain some valuable accounting and bookkeeping skills. Over the course of the modules, Event Trix aims to teach you how to manage people, money, work on your interpersonal skills and guide you through industry jargon and terminology. They are both courses that are specially designed to make such an intimidating subject accessible and easy to understand. You'll have 12-month access to both courses, so check out the modules below and get some amazing skills to add to your CV!

This is the description of one of the courses available.

phill99

I have been in business 15 years. In all that time I have never done any book keeping, tax return or VAT return. I give all of my receipts, bank statements and copies of invoices to my accountant and they do it all for me.


The thing I learnt very early on is that there are people who are far better trained, experienced and knowledgeable in certain aspects of my business than I am and this includes accounting, graphic design, website designing / hosting etc. This is what they do for a living, all day, everyday. Let them do it.


This allows me to concentrate on the aspects of the business that I am good at - business development, marketing, customer management/care and executing my core business (which is kitchen and bathroom fitting).


Every time you get involved in a non-core activity, you do so at the expense of marketing your business, developing products, servicing your customers etc.


So what I am saying is don't get involved in any book keeping or any tax / vat returns - let some one else sweat this and you focus on helping your husband build a successful business.

Savvy_Sue

I can see where phill99 is coming from, but the accountant will probably thank you for NOT handing over a shoebox full of receipts and invoices, and you probably want to keep an eye on how things are going month by month, if not day by day!

Sure, if can manage to pay a bookkeeper on a regular basis, that's one answer, but the alternative is to start playing with Excel. Multiple columns, label them across the top, but I'm going to put them going down just to give you an idea of what you might need, giving the cell descriptions:

A1 Date of transaction
B1 Date on statement (you fill this in later)
C1 Which account? (Bank, cash, credit card for example)
D1 Who to / from? (eg in cell D3 you might have Mrs Smith for services rendered IN, or Cash and Carry for Widgets OUT)
E1 Amount in (Mrs Smith's payment would be in cell D3)
F1 Amount out (Cash and Carry for Widgets would be in cell F3)
G1 Balance (Put whatever you started with in G2, then in G3 put =G2+E3-F3, then copy this down [use the help function to find out how to do that])
H1 Notes (just put anything useful in there, eg that Mrs Smith is due to pay by bank transfer)

Meanwhile you have a folder into which you religiously put every invoice, every receipt, every bank statement, and you put a tick on it as it gets entered into the spreadsheet.

There are a lot of much cleverer things you can do with Excel, but if you can do and understand that simple thing, you can ask the accountant what they'd like you to do, and learn how to do that. They may have a dedicated accounts package they'll want you to use, which again will do clever stuff. But the starting point is understanding in, out, balance ...

Jm90

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

I can see where phill99 is coming from, but the accountant will probably thank you for NOT handing over a shoebox full of receipts and invoices, and you probably want to keep an eye on how things are going month by month, if not day by day!

Sure, if can manage to pay a bookkeeper on a regular basis, that's one answer, but the alternative is to start playing with Excel. Multiple columns, label them across the top, but I'm going to put them going down just to give you an idea of what you might need, giving the cell descriptions:

A1 Date of transaction
B1 Date on statement (you fill this in later)
C1 Which account? (Bank, cash, credit card for example)
D1 Who to / from? (eg in cell D3 you might have Mrs Smith for services rendered IN, or Cash and Carry for Widgets OUT)
E1 Amount in (Mrs Smith's payment would be in cell D3)
F1 Amount out (Cash and Carry for Widgets would be in cell F3)
G1 Balance (Put whatever you started with in G2, then in G3 put =G2+E3-F3, then copy this down [use the help function to find out how to do that])
H1 Notes (just put anything useful in there, eg that Mrs Smith is due to pay by bank transfer)

Meanwhile you have a folder into which you religiously put every invoice, every receipt, every bank statement, and you put a tick on it as it gets entered into the spreadsheet.

There are a lot of much cleverer things you can do with Excel, but if you can do and understand that simple thing, you can ask the accountant what they'd like you to do, and learn how to do that. They may have a dedicated accounts package they'll want you to use, which again will do clever stuff. But the starting point is understanding in, out, balance ...

wow, thank you for taking the time to write that up for me, that's really useful information...

well so far i have been keeping all receipts stapled in a diary on the day received..
I will however do as you suggested and see if i can get the hang of excel.

He is a fire and security engineer and holds no stock, so a customer would pay a deposit for the job which would cover cost of materials then the rest of the money would be his time/travel.

his main expense is fuel... in the last 6 weeks its cost over £1000

we also have all invoices so far filed, and saved on an app online which also tells us how much vat and tax is owed per invoice...

i wasn't planning to take over the accounts this year, i was going to 'try' to do it and see if mine and the accountants tally up at the end of the year, but as Phil said he does this day in day out, whereas i have no clue. I thought we could save a little extra by doing this as at the moment i do all the invoicing and office work, but taking over it all feels a little daunting.

Does an accountant charge a basic rate for different things they do? or does it depend on what the company is? would me not giving him a shoe box full of receipts and invoices mean we could pay less? We have asked him a couple of times now for his prices, although he is great with giving advice, he isn't being very forthcoming with his costs. we asked recently how much for him to deal with payroll and still waiting for a reply.

Jm90

phill99 wrote: »

I have been in business 15 years. In all that time I have never done any book keeping, tax return or VAT return. I give all of my receipts, bank statements and copies of invoices to my accountant and they do it all for me.


The thing I learnt very early on is that there are people who are far better trained, experienced and knowledgeable in certain aspects of my business than I am and this includes accounting, graphic design, website designing / hosting etc. This is what they do for a living, all day, everyday. Let them do it.


This allows me to concentrate on the aspects of the business that I am good at - business development, marketing, customer management/care and executing my core business (which is kitchen and bathroom fitting).


Every time you get involved in a non-core activity, you do so at the expense of marketing your business, developing products, servicing your customers etc.


So what I am saying is don't get involved in any book keeping or any tax / vat returns - let some one else sweat this and you focus on helping your husband build a successful business.

Thank you Phil, that's really helpful

Maybe if i just keep things tidy and organised it may help some what.

Husband is doing work for a company where the wife deals with it all and i kind if thought as i am in the office maybe i should learn how to do it to, although i have downloaded, read even she has emailed me with advice and what i need to do, i still cant manage to get my head round it...maybe its baby brain :rotfl:

Being solely in charge of VAT & TAX returns is scary, so i will leave it to the accountant once we can understand how much he charges.

We have designed the website, its not live yet but nearly there, as we are just starting out we we were hoping to save money where we could...but as you said that takes my husband away from his main job and the other things we need to do to get this off the ground, everything else seems to be taking over and always on our mind - stress.

If i had the money to get someone to sort the website and do everything else, like you have it would be amazing and take so much pressure off.

I'm going to call some accountants tomorrow, not sure if i will need a meeting or whether they will speak to me on the phone, could you advise on what i need to be asking, like would they charge one amount for doing the TAX return, another for VAT and another amount for payroll?

Thanks again

00ec25

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

I can see where phill99 is coming from, but the accountant will probably thank you for NOT handing over a shoebox full of receipts and invoices, and you probably want to keep an eye on how things are going month by month, if not day by day!

Sure, if can manage to pay a bookkeeper on a regular basis, that's one answer, but the alternative is to start playing with Excel. Multiple columns, label them across the top, but I'm going to put them going down just to give you an idea of what you might need, giving the cell descriptions:

A1 Date of transaction
B1 Date on statement (you fill this in later)
C1 Which account? (Bank, cash, credit card for example)
D1 Who to / from? (eg in cell D3 you might have Mrs Smith for services rendered IN, or Cash and Carry for Widgets OUT)
E1 Amount in (Mrs Smith's payment would be in cell D3)
F1 Amount out (Cash and Carry for Widgets would be in cell F3)
G1 Balance (Put whatever you started with in G2, then in G3 put =G2+E3-F3, then copy this down [use the help function to find out how to do that])
H1 Notes (just put anything useful in there, eg that Mrs Smith is due to pay by bank transfer)

Meanwhile you have a folder into which you religiously put every invoice, every receipt, every bank statement, and you put a tick on it as it gets entered into the spreadsheet.

There are a lot of much cleverer things you can do with Excel, but if you can do and understand that simple thing, you can ask the accountant what they'd like you to do, and learn how to do that. They may have a dedicated accounts package they'll want you to use, which again will do clever stuff. But the starting point is understanding in, out, balance ...

the husband's business appears to be VAT registered

the layout of the spsheet you suggest will therefore merely complicate matters if the OP intends, as they state, to take over both bookkeeping and VAT returns since that layout does not accommodate VAT in any manner

it would be easier to have one sheet solely for receipts and another solely for expenses, that way the output and input VAT will be identified as the figures required for the boxes on the return. There may (will) be some transactions which do not appear in the bank account and so the total receipts and/or expenses may not equal the bank balance but those transactions must go on the VAT return

OP also mentions that the husband takes payment in the form of a deposit, therefore the VAT treatment (tax point date) of a deposit must be understood

OP sorry I have no knowledge of your courses. The extract you post above would, on the face of it appear off target for what you say you want as the emphasis is too much on HR and not enough on payroll.


I would agree with the posters above who correctly suggest that giving a shoebox of paperwork to the accountant will be counter productive as the accountant then has to sort through that not knowing the business as well as you and so likely to be a) time consuming and b) result in miscategorisations of misunderstood items. By all means give a list of receipts and payments to the accountant as that will save them time and lower their charges, but unless fully book kept it would be counter productive to give anything more than that as the accountant would then need to spend time unpicking/checking for errors and so effectively ends up repeating the exercise anyway.

Pennywise

Savvy_Sue wrote: »

but the accountant will probably thank you for NOT handing over a shoebox full of receipts and invoices

It doesn't have to be one extreme or the other. In 99% of cases, it's somewhere between, as agreed between the client and accountant.

Very, very few clients will give their accountant a perfectly balanced and correct set of book-keeping (in fact not every, in fact very few book-keepers give the accountant a 100% correct/accurate set of books either). At the other extreme, very, very few clients just hand their accountant a shoe box or carrier bag of unsorted/unopened paperwork.

The middle ground is huge. Some people cobble together spreadsheets to keep themselves up to date with information they want to see, but they're seldom much use for the end of year accountant. Other people will cobble together spreadsheets just to do the vat return, i.e. list of sales, and/or list of vatable purchase invoices. So they do their own VAT return, but the accountant needs to add in all the non VATable stuff and balance the bank etc.

Some people will use accounting software, but only for parts of the book-keeping, such as sales invoicing and the sales ledger.

Sometimes it's actually less time consuming for the accountant to do it all themselves from the shoebox or carrier bag, rather than try to work out what the client has done if their book-keeping is poor or their spreadsheet is full or errors or doesn't have all the relevant information (i.e. invoice date AND payment date). (or if they've used a poor book-keeper!).

You really need a decent conversation with your accountant to agree what each of you will do. I'm more than happy for a client to hand in a cobbled together spreadsheet or carrier bag of screwed up paperwork, if that's what they want to do. But, I want to have it agreed up front as to timescales and costings etc. You need your accountant to explain your options to you, to advise on suggested software to use, to tell you how to organise/file your paperwork etc. If you can't have that kind of sensible dialogue with them, you need a different accountant.