As one of the people who entered into negotiation with HMRC for nearly two years to reach agreement on this concession I was very surprised to be directed to your article with its clickbait type heading.
HMRC do not define a virtual assistant at all. They define a possible concession for those who consider virtual assistance to be their business and where a set of conditions also applies. Virtual Assistant is not a job title, but a way of working, and your title and first paragraphs are highly inaccurate.
Virtual Assistants “in your profession” will still have to register for supervision in the same way as “the rest of the profession” do now. Offering bookkeeping as a service still requires the same supervision as other bookkeepers. Nothing has changed.
We wanted to help VAs who offer administrative services such as invoicing or listing of expenses. Until cloud accountancy systems became the norm, admin assistants would create invoices in a manual document but they wouldn’t touch the daybooks of the business. These days creating an invoice and saving to the daybooks is often one simultaneous action. This caused issues for the HMRC definition of a bookkeeper, which is someone who affects the daybooks. They did not and do not consider invoicing to be a bookkeeping activity. Affecting the daybooks is - so admin assistants were being drawn in to MLR supervison.
Most bookkeepers/accountants don’t want to be creating and sending invoices on a daily basis but there are other third-party service providers willing to cover this role. The concession is not designed for anyone to be carrying out unqualified bookkeeping services, it’s for someone that is turning over less than £125 a month on daybook affecting activities. I hardly think they are “in your profession”!
My answers
As one of the people who entered into negotiation with HMRC for nearly two years to reach agreement on this concession I was very surprised to be directed to your article with its clickbait type heading.
HMRC do not define a virtual assistant at all. They define a possible concession for those who consider virtual assistance to be their business and where a set of conditions also applies. Virtual Assistant is not a job title, but a way of working, and your title and first paragraphs are highly inaccurate.
Virtual Assistants “in your profession” will still have to register for supervision in the same way as “the rest of the profession” do now. Offering bookkeeping as a service still requires the same supervision as other bookkeepers. Nothing has changed.
We wanted to help VAs who offer administrative services such as invoicing or listing of expenses. Until cloud accountancy systems became the norm, admin assistants would create invoices in a manual document but they wouldn’t touch the daybooks of the business. These days creating an invoice and saving to the daybooks is often one simultaneous action. This caused issues for the HMRC definition of a bookkeeper, which is someone who affects the daybooks. They did not and do not consider invoicing to be a bookkeeping activity. Affecting the daybooks is - so admin assistants were being drawn in to MLR supervison.
Most bookkeepers/accountants don’t want to be creating and sending invoices on a daily basis but there are other third-party service providers willing to cover this role. The concession is not designed for anyone to be carrying out unqualified bookkeeping services, it’s for someone that is turning over less than £125 a month on daybook affecting activities. I hardly think they are “in your profession”!