Setting up a small business - do I need an accountant or online tools

Aspatria

I retired from the NHS last year.
I have set up a part time consultancy  and operate as a sole trader. 

This will bring in a small additional income (approx £15k pa) . 

I had planned to submit accounts myself using self assessment. 

Is it worth using an accountant instead? Or a digital tool like Quick books?

thank you

Pennywise

Plenty of people do their own accounts/self assessment, especially sole traders.
I tend to suggest that people start at the end result.  I.e. look at what HMRC require.  The HMRC webpages have all the information you'll need to register as self employed, and have lots of factsheets, help pages, etc and instructions as to what figures go where in the self assessment return.  There are also loads of other websites with advice on book-keeping, accounts preparation, tax planning advice, etc.  
If you have the time and inclination to do a fair bit of research, and the ability to do pretty basic number crunching, then you'll be able to go through the motions of the book-keeping right through to the tax return submission.
But, saying that, loads of people are also capable of servicing their car, wallpapering their lounge, doing their own laundry & cleaning or gardening, but still decide they'd rather pay someone else to do it!!
As for whether to use QB, or one of the many other online book-keeping systems (Xero, Freeagent etc), you have to appreciate they're just book-keeping tools.  With some, you may have the ability to submit a self assessment tax return, but you may have to do a fair amount of adjustments (capital allowances, depreciation, accruals, prepayments, stock, etc) - you need to do research to know whether you have to do this kind of thing!  You also have to enter all your personal tax data, i.e. pensions, bank interest, dividends, property letting income, gift aid donations, etc etc.  They're certainly not simple "click and submit" systems despite their marketing slogans!  Most people would suffice with a simple spreadsheet or even hand written records.  So you need to properly evaluate the software to ensure you understand what it does and what it doesn't.

tacpot12

An accountant and an online accounts package like Quickbooks are very different things.
An online accounts package can't do much more that record your business transactions. It might have certain reporting features, e.g. that allow it to print a report that mirrors the Self-Employment pages of your tax return, but I would check if it does this.

 An accountant's main job is to give you advice, although they can prepare or check your calculations before you complete your tax return for a fee. 

Many small businesses record their business transactions using Excel, but many use an online accounting package. The cost of the online services is usually quite expensive. 

If you want to use an accountant to get the benefit of their expertise, you can interview a couple of local accountants and ask them "How can you add value to a self-employed consultant like myself?". If you think you want to engage them, as for their advice about how to keep records of your transactions, cheaply and in a way that will allow you to comply with the HMRC requirements. 

I'd also recommend that you check out the Small Business Toolbox channel on YouTube. There is lots of good advice there. 

martindow

I think that there is a lot of value in seeing an accountant to set things up to be sure that you claim expenses correctly for using a home office or apportioning expenses for instance.  Once it is set up it sounds a fairly simple business in that there will probably not be many payments in or expenses each month and I would be inclined to use a spreadsheet to record items and add totals.  You certainly don't need to employ an accountant to enter the totals in HMRC's self assessment which I find excellent and straightforward to use.

Phil&Michelle

An accountant will probably charge you around £300 to do your annual tax return but you will still need to keep good records of income and expenditure. If you're keeping the records updated most of the hard work is done. You could try accounting software which has the function top auto-submit your tax return to HMRC but even without this you can print an annual profit and loss to reprt and use it to do the tax return. Xero accounting software is good but £28 per month, a cheaper option is Pandle Pro for £6 per month (I've been using it for 6 months as seems to have all the functionality I need for my small biz).