Liric Accountants -Â April 2015 Newsletter

“Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get" - Dale Carnegie (1888-1955)

Refer a client to Liric and get up to 20% off next year’s fee – speak to us to find out how!

Small enough to care, experienced enough to deliver.

Lisa's Marathon Update

There are now only 3 weeks to go until the big day - The London Marathon! Lisa is coming to the end of her training and has started to taper off and reduce the miles.

What that really means is a mere quick 13 miler at the weekend, and a couple of shorter runs in the week; easy stuff compared to the 20 miles of the last 2 weekends. Lisa says: “That sort of distance would have been unthinkable 4 months ago! It’s really amazing how the body does get in trim with some dedicated training”.

Lisa’s hard work pounding the streets has been more than worth it, as the pounds have been growing on her charity site for NSPCC. Her initial target of £2,000 has been reached and she is now hoping to raise £2,500 or even more.

“I have been amazed at people’s generosity for this extremely worthy cause. I am extremely grateful for the support I have received”.

If you would like to donate please visit her charity site. We look forward to letting you know her marathon time and the total amount raised next month.

A Welcome to Annette

Lisa is delighted to welcome Annette to the Liric team as the Practice Manager. Annette is a qualified ACCA (Certified Accountant) of more than 10 years standing. She joins the team from a slightly larger practice than Liric and comes with a wealth of experience in all aspects of accounts for small businesses, tax, payroll, vat and bookkeeping. Like the rest of the Liric team she will be working with you and helping you achieve your financial goals.

When not at work Annette enjoys spending quality time with friends and family, together with going out for dinner and salsa dancing.

We are sure you will join us in welcoming Annette to Liric and she looks forward to meeting and speaking with you over the coming months.

Auto Enrolment

Lately we have been bombarded with emails and advice about Auto Enrolment (AE). You probably are too, and perhaps you are now starting to think how this will affect you. The good news is that we will be working with you to ensure your AE obligations are met.

Many of our clients, being “smaller employers”, do not have a staging date until January 2017, but some of you will need to address matters by the end of this year.

January 2017 seems a long way off, but if you have a PAYE scheme with employees and/or directors that have a service contract then these rules will affect you and putting your head in the sand and hoping it will go away really is not an option as there are significant penalties for non-compliance.

How can we help?

Liric have put together a series of packages we will be able to offer you to ensure you are AE compliant. We will be issuing more detailed advice and guidance which will include payroll solutions if you process your own payroll, suggestions as to what pension package is available for the smaller employer, and how to put this all together.

For our clients for whom we already undertake payroll processing we will be enhancing our software to enable the workforce assessments to be done, transfer information to and from the pension provider and generate all the required communications for your employees.

Here is the newsletter we have previously circulated, so if you have not looked at this before we really do urge you to start taking notice. If you are worried about dealing with this yourself, now may be the time to consider outsourcing your payroll processing so do let us know.

Bookkeeping Software Solutions

We have previously mentioned Xero as a great book keeping package for small businesses. This is cloud based solution and has many advantages over traditional PC based software. We have moved many of our clients for whom we carry out routine bookkeeping onto this system and the results have been extremely positive.

Business owners have much better visibility of not just how the sales and underlying profit are looking, but a day to day view on which customers have paid and - probably more importantly - which ones haven’t! The ability to generate quotes which can then be seamlessly converted into a sales invoice once accepted is a new function. Xero can also now deal with payroll and RTI reporting and a stock function has also been recently incorporated.

We have recently been trialling, and are now signed up to an “add-on”, called Receiptbank We can simply scan or email supplier invoices, or even take a photo on a phone of a small receipt, upload these files and the software then extracts the key information from this. This is then removing the need for manual data entry.

That information is then uploaded straight into software such as Xero or Quickbooks Online. The scanned version of the invoice then sits behind the entry in the accounting software, which you can drill down into. Therefore, it also alleviates the need to keep files of hard copies of invoices.

Do speak to us if you are interested in finding more about how this could benefit you.

Payroll Year End

We have been especially busy in the last couple of weeks processing the year end payroll.

Real Time Information (RTI) reporting has meant that the reporting to HMRC is largely done during the year, but it’s still necessary to generate P60 forms to give to your employees (deadline 31 May) and also if you provide any benefits in kind to employees such as health insurance or company vehicles then a P11D return needs to be prepared.

If you are unsure about your responsibilities on these returns then please get in touch with us as soon as possible.

Website