What's best practice on filing accounts (Co House/ HMRC) and other company secretarial tasks, getting the accounting staff to do this themselves, or employ somebody full time to do it?
Replies (7)
Please login or register to join the discussion.
Depends
If you are using in house software then when the client has approved the accounts I'd notify the person who was responsible for them to push the 2 buttons. There is always a chance that the accounts submission could spark something else that needs doing such as writing to HMRC about say an old S455 liability.
With regard to Co Sec work, again, if you're using software, like Iris, then it's so quick to change a name add a director or do the annual return then push a button, that administrative staff (that's now me) can do it.
Negligible admin required
If you are using in house software then when the client has approved the accounts I'd notify the person who was responsible for them to push the 2 buttons.
This. I don't see the need for specific admin staff in a small accounting firm these days.
In our office there's currently 5 of us. Every one is (training to be) an accountant.
I think if we were to recruit a staff member who was NOT specifically doing accounting work, it'd be IT support, or marketing, before admin support.
Traditionally
"Keeping the stat books" was seen as something best outsourced to someone who did it all the time, and so in my practices 15+ years ago, we'd use someone a day a week, with her inbox full of changes in directors, year ends, annual returns to do, shares to issue, dividend paperwork etc, it was something the rest of us didn't want to get involved with.
As I say above, this vanished once we'd taken up software that handled 90% of it as we went along doing client work.
Admin support was originally needed to handling paper & information flow but, hopefully, for most, this has moved to the latter only.
Many processes for client service these days are now automated or controlled from start to finish by one piece of software and so, seeing as the fee earner is involved in 90% of this as a doer, it makes sense for them to also handle the 10%.
As Maslins says, with the streamlining of the doing stuff there's more time for good quality general client and contact communication and so this is what I used my administrators for, keeping clients, contacts and prospective clients up to date with tax and other stuff, what we were doing etc.
what i do
I have 2 staff members.
They prepare the accounts, tax etc. I review, they clear the review points and I confirm review points cleared.
I then forward draft accounts to client with some comments, meet with the client if they wish to go over the accounts but in most cases the accounts and tax are approved remotely.
On approval I will send them the final accounts and tax return to be electronically signed together with the fee note.
When the fee is paid submit myself via our software to CH and HMRC respectively.
When we get past January we might change this process and once the file is cleared I will give the file back to staff member to do the closing off and filing with CH and HMRC.
It's two buttons. Why would you need someone else to do it other than the accountant who is working on the file?