TWD Accounting Blog

Regardless of its nature, accurate financial record-keeping is essential for every business. It is one of the elements that make your enterprise a success. As a Driving Instructor, keeping good accounts is just as important as a good diary keeping system or making sure your car is kept clean and tidy.

Your accountant will much prefer orderly information. It will save time for them, and may even help bring your fee down too. If your records are already complete it makes preparing your end of year accounts and tax return quicker and easier. Good bookkeeping has other benefits to your business:

• Good financial information can help obtain a business loan.
• Having a reasonable estimate your profits makes it easier to plan for tax you have to pay.
• This can make it easier to avoid unnecessary tax penalties or interest.

Unfortunately, bookkeeping is time consuming. Or it can be. In the past, it was all done manually, but thankfully those days are gone – most bookkeeping is done on computers now.

Most simply you can use something like Excel to create a simple spread sheets. If you know how to use them, these can work for simple figures. For more detail though, they are limited.
The next step up is dedicated accounting or bookkeeping software. This has lots of benefits;

• You can see your records easily at any time
• Changes can be made easily, and mistakes rectified
• You keep your records in a standard format
• All the calculations are done for you
• There is a record of all your transactions that you can refer to easily
• Reports can be created instantly

The problem is, most of this software was designed for the accountant, and it can be hard to use. It also suffers from the disadvantages that all ‘traditional’ software has, such needing lengthy installation and becoming obsolete quickly.

Recently there has been move to online accounting software.

It works quite differently from traditional software. The crucial difference is that the program is held centrally, on a large server, and is accessed over the internet.

The way accounting software works – you enter information and save it for later – is ideally suited to this type of method. Amongst the benefits of any online system are

• You don’t have software to install
• It’s always the latest version
• Backups are automatic, so your data is safe
• You can access your records from any computer at any time
• It is very secure
• It is generally much cheaper

Don’t forget though, that all the usual benefits to your business of using accounting software still apply.
In summary:

• Every business or sole trader needs to keep records
• Any form of bookkeeping (if done well) is better than none at all.
• Using computers is much more efficient than manual books.
• Accounting software can help but is complex and has limitations.
• Online software solves many of the problems of traditional software, but retains the benefits.

This may sound too good to be true, but it isn’t. Online accounting is here and available now. It could really help your business and save you money.

You may have seen the adverts on Channel 5 for the new TV series ‘The Business Inspector’ sponsored by HMRC.

One of the team thought that a TV advert for Arithmo placed during the program may work for us. As Arithmo is the system that TWD Accountants provides our clients to support their small business accounting needs we thought viewers of The Business Inspector would be an ideal audiance for us.

Having never looked at this type of promotion before we did some investigating. After speaking to Channel 5 we decided that it would be more cost effective to run a series of adverts during the re-run of ‘The Business Inspector’ on Fiver. We could then monitor the response without blowing our budget.

Feeling a little scared and under prsssure of a 48 hour deadline for creating and approving the advert we pushed ahead.

The creative was put together by the team at our local station Channel M, approved and passed through licensing. Everything was fine and on schedule we were due to air our first TV advert on Sunday 21 March at about 9.15 on Fiver.

Then the bombshell, we found out last Friday that there is no re-run on Fiver, in fact there never was.

That was not not the end of our foray in to TV advertising, we worked hard with Channel 5 to find alternative dates and times.

I am please to announce that our advert was aired first on Wednesday 24 March at approx 8.45 with further showings due at the same time on 31 March and 7 April.

If you missed the first showing and can’t wait until the 31 March then you can view Arithmo TV advert here.

Well what do you think?

I attended the MSA Conference at the weekend. This is about the 7th that I have personally been to, it’s always nice to catch up with some familiar faces, meet existing clients and of course make new contacts.

Each year I try to learn something new about Driving Instructors, their industry and how, as accountants we can help. This years most popular question was not about tax, their accounts or indeed details of our service but

‘How hard is it to change accountants?’

There appeared to be a genuine hesitance caused by fear of the unknown, as one chap said ‘better the devil you know!’ Of course this is something I have been asked many times before but it struck me this year that for one reason or another more people were looking to change accountants but the fear of the unknown was stopping them.

Q. So how hard is it to change accountants?

A. Easy, there is some work to do but it is effortless I would say the following is the general process:

1. Search for your new accountant, find one that specialises in your industry, act on personal recommendation or approach your professional body for guidance.

2. Once you have made the decision to change advise your existing accountant you no longer require their services. I would say letter is the best way to this but you may wish to speak to them depending upon the relationship you have.

3. Appoint you new accountant, who will ask you for the name and address of the previous accountant, amongst other information needed.

4. Your new accountant will write to the previous one for professional clearance and any information relevant to your affairs.

It really is that simple, no hassle at all, the new accountants have been appointed, and they will advise HMRC and liaise with the previous one. All you need to do is continue as usual.

Regular readers of this blog will no doubt know that TWD accountants specialise in driving instuctor accounts and tax.

This specialism has grown over the years through our links with many driving instructor organisations. Our longest links have been with the MSA and go back alomost 10 years. This association has grown to such an extent that we now operate the MSA Accountants service and have recently launched MSA Protection a piece of mind protection scheme aimed at MSA members concerned about tax investigations.

I am attending this years MSA Conference, for those attending the conference we will be operating a special show offer. Anyone MSA member that signs up as TWD client the first year fee will be discounted to £99 plus vat, however this offer is only valid at the conference.

See you in Solihull!

Following my last blog post on the 22 Feb I am pleased to announce that we have agreed a special offer price for accountancy service with Ideas4Adis. The offer runs from today until the 30 April 2010. The Ideas4ADIs range of training products has received praise from customers and the media alike for outstanding quality and fair prices.

As we are approaching the end of the current tax year keep a look out for further special promotions that we will be running.