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Our West Country general practitioner's clients are bracing themselves for a poor summer season - but some are bucking the trend in creative ways.

28 May - Some of our clients are struggling with falling order books - but not one particular company. They have unfortunately specialised in manufacturing plastic and rubber components for the motor industry, which is not a good business to be in now. Luckily their marketing and production directors have got their heads together and found some new markets to target, and they are just going into production on a whole new line of ... adult toys!

I guess plastic and rubber moulding machinery can be used to produce a whole range of products, so why not. It does give us a few problems as auditors though. For example, theft was never a big issue when all they had were bins full of grommets and hoses, but now they and we will need to take a fresh look at security and staff pilferage.

There is also an almost limitless fund of dodgy jokes and innuendo to be had out of this. I just won't be able to look at the tool room in the same light!

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26 May - Bank Holiday weekend - I usually hate it, the roads get jammed and I turn into the original grumpy old man - but not this year. It looks like the recession is starting to hit us. There are far fewer holidaymakers about this year, despite the great weather. My local was doing very decent Sunday roasts at £3.95 and the car park was never full!

Agricultural show and music festival seasons are upon is, it will be interesting to see how my itinerant trader clients get on this year. Many of them rely on this intensive summer period for their whole year's income, and in previous years foot and mouth disease and bad weather really affected their incomes. This year looks like it could be evn worse if the Great British public decides to stay at home and not spend its hard-earned cash.

Where does that leave us? We need to be working on a number of fronts -

1. Helping our struggling clients to survive - reducing 31 July payments on account, looking at averaging claims, making sure all those eligible are claiming tax credits.

2. Helping our struggling clients with useful business advice - there are all sorts of additional, added-value services we can offer to help clients economise, diversify and reorganise their businesses to both survive and flourish.

3. We need to be actively looking for new clients - so, yes, I'm going to have to eat a few of those networking breakfasts! Some clients will give up, some will go bust, and some will seek cheaper accountants, so we need to be replacing them as the year goes on.

4. Watching our own business - especially credit control. As we head into our busy season we need to watch the debtor days and head off any problems. We offer fee funding via a third party, SO and DD payments to spread payments, we accept debit and credit cards - in short, we'll do virtually anything to make it easier for clients to pay us. The challenge this year is making sure that they all do!

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22 May - Is it just me, or has the business community gone mad over 'networking'? I reckon I get invites to FSB, BNI, Chamber of Commerce, 4Networking, etc on almost a daily basis - I'd be clinically obese if I attended every event I was invited to!

And what is it with breakfast events? I find it harder and harder to get up early these days, so driving for a hour across country for a 7am breakfast doesn't exactly fill be with joy. If I do make the effort, what do you usually find but a room full of ex-executives late 50s or older who are either trying to set up some irrelevant, part-time lifestyle business, or to sell you some sort of consultancy that amounts to little more than applied common sense. Come on everyone, where are all the real businesses at these events? Presumably they're at work, running real businesses! What we need to find out is where these people congregate, because that's where we're going to do some seriously useful networking. Most of them are too busy to play golf these days, so that's not usually an option. Gym or squash club? - maybe, but have you ever tried to strike up a business conversation in those places? We do a bit of telesales these days (we hire a company to do it for us), and I reckon if you can do it well it's about the best way of getting yourself in front of the sort of businesses you want as clients. And there's no fear of getting fat that way!!

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20 May - The 2008-09 PAYE filings seem to have gone pretty well. The facility to log "Filing Only" clients on the HMRC website is great, it means you can very quickly file online even without a 64-8.

Strangely, I had a couple of very small payrolls set up on the HMRC CD-ROM and decided to click through to file the end of year forms online from there. It worked a treat, and when it came to giving the login details I just used the practice login - the clients are not registered for filing online themselves, and there's no 64-8 to cover PAYE - and the forms filed without a hitch. I was surprised that it works, but it does.

Now if they would only let us do the same with VAT...!

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18 May - Another of this year's panic days - P35s to be filed and there are still a few missing - and I seem to be responsible for at least one! I suddenly remembered over the weekend that I had promised to visit a new client in the last couple of weeks, not that the accounts are urgent, but they took on their first employee in January and gave me all the PAYE figures to finish the year, and they are languishing somewhere at the bottom of my in-tray. Last minute grovel coming up!

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15 May - One success story among the online services seems to be PAYE and P35s. We have filed dozens and they have gone through without a hitch. Filing from the HMRC CD-ROM is also a breeze, so full marks to HMRC for this one.

Now maybe they can get the VAT system sorted out!

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12 May - The summer brings many joys for we West Country folks, one of which is the many annual agricultural shows. Every major town seems to have one, plus we have the county shows: Devon, Royal Cornwall, Bath and West, etc. Plus there are innumerable music festivals from Glastonbury downwards. All this means misery on the roads for locals.

But at least the local highways authorities are making plans to manage the rise in traffic volumes. I just wonder who does their legal drafting though. We received an official document at home today announcing that the county council, "in pursuance of Section 14(1) of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 as amended, intend to make an order the effect of which will be that no person shall cause or permit any vehicle to proceed along that length of Green Lane which extends from its junction with the A3xx to its junction with Farm Road otherwise than in a generally easterly direction."

Why couldn't they just say that, from next Friday and all weekend, Green Lane will be one way heading out of town?

No doubt the county draftsman is hoping one day to be promoted to the Treasury drafting team - looks like perfect training for drafting tax legislation.

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8 May - We have chosen to centralise our practice management system in one office and have the other offices access it via the Internet. Which is great while the Internet is working OK.

Some of our offices are in cable TV towns, so we have set them up with dual modems with both Virgin broadband and BT ADSL lines - the modems automatically balance the load between the two services to ensure 100% up time and a decent connection speed, They're laughing, while we're stuck with whatever the local BT exchange can cobble together for us. And today that wasn't much! Our connection speed has been at an all time low and the billing system has been like wading through treacle.

Wouldn't you know this would happen when we're trying to finish off April bills!!

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5 May - Nice long weekend. Shame the roads around here get jammed with caravans and motorhomes as soon as the sun comes out! The next big event on the West Country roads will be the Glastonbury festival - must make sure I stay in the office either side of that weekend. I have been virtually stranded in a queue of beaten up VW camper vans and gypsy caravans in previous years after attending 31 May stocktakes!

Back to the online thing today. So far we have managed to get:

- All possible 2008 SA Tax returns filed online
- All company Annual Returns, and most other forms and abbreviated accounts, filed online at Companies House
- All new company formations are done electronically
- Virtually all P35s for 2008/09 lodged online
- Most new VAT registrations submitted online - they seem to go through quicker

Plus we do online credit searches and reports on new clients, and offer it as a service for existing clients to monitor their customers.

We now have to get set up to file 08/09 P11Ds online too. Then I'm going to return to these VAT Returns (that I still can't work out). We are also going to start a trial of some online accounting software to see if we can enhance our management accounting service to some clients.

Where next?

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1 May - Can't believe I missed the Budget VAT press release about the standard rate. Yes, the rate is going back up to 17.5% on 1 January next year. But the Chancellor is also giving himself the right to increase the standard rate for up to a year simply by statutory instrument in future - so (a) he could still set a rate above 17.5% next year without any further debate, or (b) (more likely) he could quickly do so immediately after a General Election!

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Last month our West Country general practitioner tried to start doing clients' VAT online - and failed miserably - and then along came the Budget!- there's more in his .