I’ve received a bit of pushback from people who reckon my 72/48/24 hour turnarounds are impossible to achieve so I thought I’d share this story of a client who was referred to us last week by an existing client of Acumenica. I’ve had to keep the client anonymous as his wife didn’t know the extent of the predicament he was in. For now, I’ve called him Rodney.
Rodney called us last Wednesday and we established very quickly that he’d been neglectful of his accounts: He set up his company in December 2020 and, with the help of a local accountant, got registered for VAT / PAYE etc. He had also (helpfully) been provided with a bookkeeping spreadsheet to record his income and expenditure. For the first six months everything went well then his wife, who was also the de facto book-keeper decided she didn’t want to work with Rodney anymore so she went and got a job. Things went downhill after that. Rodney didn’t have time to prepare VAT returns (or even fill out his spreadsheet) so he just paid assessments as they came in. And of course he never prepared accounts or tax returns either. He did manage to keep on top of the payroll though, so that’s something. Eh?
Fast forward twenty-one months and Rodney gets a call from HMRC asking where his VAT returns are. At almost the same time he receives a letter from Companies House reminding him the company accounts are due and he also realised he never registered for self assessment so he needs to file a personal tax return in jig time, too.
That’s when Acumenica swing into action: During our triage call with the client we establish what needs to be done and when. (The answers to which are: everything, and now) We agree a fee (not cheap given the urgency, but not too dear either), Rodney pays us by card and we get cracking. Within two hours, we have someone at his door to pick up all his paperwork which is then scanned and input into our system – the VAT returns are ready to be filed on Thursday morning. We then have a conference call – Rodney, HMRC and yours truly – to explain the situation and to confirm that the returns are ready for filing. HMRC are remarkably calm about this. Thursday afternoon we file the returns and prepare the first year accounts for Rodney’s approval. After a bit of tooing and froing, these are signed off on Friday and submitted to Companies House at 10.45pm on the deadline day. (Yes, the deadline day was 16th September due to the date the company was incorporated.) The corporation tax return was filed at the same time. Over the weekend, we also prepared the self assessment return but can’t yet file this in the absence of a reference number.
So there you are, one happy Acumenica+ client who would be perfect for a case study on the website. When I asked him about this he replied “No chance, my missus would bloody murder me if she knew the mess I get into.”
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