Many businesses trade only through their bank account, and all we ask here is that you put your bank statements in sensible order and write up your cheque book stubs clearly. Otherwise leave the rest to us.

Just put everything in a box and give it to us after the year end. That does mean everything, so never throw anything away and never lose anything.

If you have cash income, then obviously you need to keep a daily record of takings, but this could just be in a notebook or an exercise book rather than a ledger. We can give you a free book to get you started, and our book has a page to record pre-trading items like a computer and a van. This book is part of a looseleaf system and you can print off extra pages yourself.

Should you have cash expenses, then you need to keep a record, but again this could be in a notebook or in our free book. In some cases, you could use a credit card for business expenses, so just let us have any statements you receive.

If you are VAT-registered, and we do your VAT returns, then we will give you a 25% discount on your accounts fee.

We work all the time on improving the advanced technology which we use to prepare your accounts. To repeat our message, we have a general preference for us doing the bookkeeping rather than letting you do it, though if you have cash income then you will need to keep a basic record. Generally though, you should only do as much bookkeeping as you actually need to do, which will be none at all if everything goes through the bank or the credit card.

How good are we at using computers?

Search for “carlisle accountants” on a mobile phone. You will see that our Google snippet is an English sentence. That says it all. Our market position as at February 25th 2019 is that we are The Technological Accountants.

One or two other accountants are OK if you do the search on a desktop computer. Get a quotation from them as well. There is no correlation whatsoever between size of firm and quality of Google snippet. Large firms may have large computer departments, but the staff are scared of sticking their neck out.

We do a bit of direct mailing. Our software reads the postcode on the envelope and overprints “Serving the Stanwix area” if it is CA3. We believe in making an early approach to prospective clients and we like to concentrate on showing them The Way In.

To influence Google to get the snippet right, make it the lead sentence of the website and also put it in the “description” meta tag. View the page source on this page to see what we mean.

Then just have a think about how prospective customers or clients are going to approach you. Walk the streets with a mobile phone and see what you look like when searched from different areas. O wad some power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us.

Warning: if you need to submit a tax return by January 31st 2020, then the first thing you need is a Unique Taxpayer Reference, and you are going nowhere without one. Click on the link for more details.