Accountant recommendation for an investment company

euanovsky

I have some spare cash sitting in my limited company. Rather than letting it sit idle not earning any interest I thought of investing them in an index fund. My accountant advised that it would be better if I set up a new company to do this and this is exactly what I have done. However my accountant told me they would not be able to prepare accounts for my investment company as they don't have the specialist software to accurately account for any gains or losses. 

Would someone be able to recommend me an accountant who would do this? My profit (c£10k p.a.) is modest so hoping not to pay more than £500 p.a. before VAT for this if possible. 

tacpot12

I would talk to them again about whether you need 'specialist software'. I track my gains and losses for CGT (for my personal tax) with a simple spreadsheet (I don't have a Ltd. company). In the spreadsheet I record the details from each contract note, and it calculates the gains and losses for me. I just start a new spreadsheet each year, using the previous year's sheet as a template. With this information from you, they should be able to produce the accounts for the investment company.

Given the scenario you describe, it seems unlikely that you will be invested in a lot of funds and do a lot of trading, so the overhead of manual accounting is relatively low.

I'm sorry I can't recommend an accountant for you. It will help if you can reply with where you are based, in case someone is aware of someone local to you. 

inspectorperez

Not quite sure what your accountant means by "specialist" software, but I think I am right in saying that it is not possible for an investment company to prepare its statutory accounts using the HMRC software which is available for most micro entities.

HM Gov website directs such companies to a list of approved providers, but most if not all of these providers require you to be a registered agent (normally your accountant) who is regulated for Money Laundering purposes.

Perhaps your accountant is not giving you quite the whole story.

TBH I think you might struggle to find an accountant prepared to accept this engagement for the fee you quote. Hope I'm wrong.

Jeremy535897

Legislation, which came into force on 1 January 2010, means that it is compulsory for companies to send their Company Tax Returns online using iXBRL for accounts and computations. It is no longer acceptable for most companies to send either the accounts or computations on paper or as a Portable Document Format (PDF) attachment to an online return.

It may be that your current accountant does not have the tagging module necessary for an investment company.