At what point does a book-keeper become an accountant?
I have a client (a brilliant one, I must say - a really lovely guy, a model client in fact!) who I go to on a weekly basis to keep his Xero file up-to-date - the company is turning over around £250k at the moment, but has big growth plans.
The story is that he (the MD) had a book-keeper before who left the records in a total state - they had done them on an Excel spreadsheet and nothing married up at all - so eventually I decided to start from scratch and recreate the records on Xero.
The client is really happy, loves Xero, and for the hours I'm there I charge him my book-keeping rate of £25 per hour.
However, I now seem to have moved a bit further forward - in a nutshell, I now also have become a signatory on his bank account, in fact am 'in charge' of his bank account completely - the client even askes ME if he can spend money (!), have now become involved in meetings with the bank, with the major shareholder also, regularly draft management accounts and discuss with the client, have done budgeting, cash flows, annual returns, the list goes on... all in my £25 an hour time slot with him!
I'm not sure yet if I'm going to be producing the accounts for him but, if not, is he getting a bit of a bargain and am I going way beyond the call of duty?!
I would be interested in everyone's thoughts...












Depends on your other business