Symptom:

Estate Agents and chartered surveyors with two branches, whose part-time bookkeeper was a retired bank official. The records were inaccurate and lagged behind, resulting in poor credit control and occasional double-payment of suppliers' invoices. The firm's previous accountants would dutifully sort through the year-end mess at some considerable cost.

Solution:

Taxsmiths® were able to bring the firm's records up to date and provide a regular monthly bookkeeping service with accurate debtor and creditor reports and reconciled bank accounts, which eliminated bill overpayments and ensured all monies owed to the firm were duly collected. Statements were issued to customers to encourage quick settlement; and balanced books meant year-end accountancy charges were halved.

Symptom:

Building contractors specialising in supplying contract labour to major construction firms across a number of sites. The bookkeeping and monthly management accounts were prepared by a senior employee, the manager, whose books always appeared to balance and whose management accounts painted a healthy picture. Yet the year-end accounts would produce an unhealthy loss.

Solution:

Taxsmiths® took over the bookkeeping and management accounts functions, and quickly discovered that the manager had frequently double-counted sales income in his monthly management accounts, presenting a rosy picture that masked an overall trading loss. Taxsmiths® quickly identified the worst loss-making sites, and tighter time and output controls were introduced to curtail losses.

Insight:

The small staff at the client's head office meant that dividing duties to ensure that two people or more contributed to the preparation of management accounts was impractical, and the case illustrates the dangers of handing too much financial control to any one person. We subsequently discovered that the manager had been covertly supplying and covering up for large quantities of labour and materials to a self-build housing project he was involved in.

Symptom:

Limited company, four owner-directors and thirty staff, manufacturing specialist engineering products, with two distinct product lines. The company enjoyed secure contracts with major blue-chip customers, and made consistent although unspectacular profits for many years. Our initial involvement, building a financial model for the company's annual tendering process, led us to suspect that the minor product line was unprofitable.

Solution:

Following our appointment, Taxsmiths® quickly re-structured the bookkeeping and accounting records so that the firm's two product lines were accounted for separately. Purchase invoices were allocated to department "A" or "B", direct costs such as materials and labour were allocated to each department, as well as shared administrative and transport costs being apportioned to each. We soon discovered that one of the product lines made a very healthy profit, whilst the second product line, which was labour intensive and resource-greedy, ran at a huge loss. Armed with that knowledge, the directors were able to take remedial action, re-structuring the loss-making department and increasing the factory-gate price of its unprofitable lines.

Insight:

We have found that many businesses can benefit from breaking down their accounting function to record separate facets of their operations. That might, for example, be separate product lines, or separate departments or branches, or separate cost-centres for firms operating on different sites or in different markets. Similarly, a breakdown of other facets such as sales mix or sales staff performance could help highlight strong and weak areas of a business. It's really just a matter of setting-up an accounting system that breaks the records down into the components that are the most critical to your particular business, and the most sensitive to variance.