Book-keeping Business

[mathepac]

A neighbour has the idea of starting a book-keeping business from her spare room.

She has no formal book-keeping / accounting qualification but has worked as a book-keeper keeping manual books of original entry and seems to me (I'm not an accountant / book-keeper either) to understand the basics e.g.

• Sales Day Book
• Purchases Day Book
• Cash Book
• Petty Cash Book
• Debit & Credit transactions
• Income & Expenses
• Assets & Liabilities
​

and her intention is to progress the work to Trial Balance stage to hand over to the client's accountant for the production of the P&L, Balance Sheet, Tax etc. As part of this work she will organise the source documents into folders by date, etc.

I have sourced software that will allow her to keep books for multiple sole traders, limited companies, partnerships, etc whether VAT-registered or not. She plans on offering invoices / statements / aged analysis for clients who currently do this manually or via spread-sheets and seems to have enough contacts locally to make it worth while. She has a meeting next week with the local start your own business gurus.

A few questions arise in relation to her plans:

• Can she legally start "Sally's Book-keeping Service" for example with no formal qualification?
• Does she need to hand-write traditional hard-copy books as well as the computer print-outs she will supply?
• Could an accountant refuse to work with the data produced by "Sally's Book-keeping Service" due to her lack of formal qualification?

Any other potential stumbling blocks you see would be great to hear before she commits her savings to the venture.

 

[Joe_90]

There are lots of people doing this.

In relation to your queries:
1 not an issue, the current position is that anyone can open an accountancy practice!
2 back up systems are up to the person, don't think it's necessary to write them up if the print offs are done.
3 as long as the work is up to standard there should not be an issue, remember that accountants are competing for this work as well so referrals may not be plentiful.

 

[mathepac]

Thanks for that