Book-keeping Business

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.

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.

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.

Thanks for that