Once the individual has prepared the basic income and expenditure that they’ve got, they’ll send me a big envelope full of the receipts. From this I prepare basic income and expenditure account. We’ve got some detailed software which can analyse, to the nth degree, all the expenses. So if they wanted as detailed printout of, say the petrol expenses, I could do that within a matter of a few keystrokes. Shortly after preparing the books, we would then go on to doing the accounts.

For the accounts, I would first prepare a draft set, clearly based just on the raw data. Having prepared this we’d meet and discuss with the client exactly what they did and how they did it, and perhaps were there any other additional items that they hadn’t mentioned or told me about. For example I had a client recently who went to New York. He was there for a week, 3 days of it was business, the remainder was personal, We managed to claim half of his travel and his hotel bills as being business related, we declared this to the Revenue and they agreed, so he saved himself about £1000 in tax.

Once the accounts have been finally prepared and agreed, I then would look at what we can do to minimise the overall tax and national insurance. If the client’s wife or son, or partner were involved in some marginal way in assisting him with his business, answering the telephone, doing some admin work, helping with the computer, we can quite easily claim these as also being part of his business expenditure.

In all cases we fully declare to the Revenue what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how we’re doing it, so we’re not cheating anyone, and we’re not trying to under-declare or do something which is not completely legal.