So you have decided to partner with Fresh Financials to find a better way of doing your bookkeeping and give your business a fresh start. We’re so pleased, and excited to get started.
We want to make sure you know what’s coming in the next few days, weeks and months of this partnership, and what you can provide us with to make this process as smooth and beneficial as possible.
We’ll kick off the process of getting to know you (and your business) better
We start with a health check: First things first, we will be performing a health check on your accounts, to discover the accuracy of your financial information. We use some excellent analytical software called Xavier to gain understanding of what technology you’ll need, and the resources we anticipate you’ll need to undertake your daily bookkeeping. We would hope to complete this within a 2-week period.
The health check helps us discover your service requirements: We will discuss the outcome of the health check with you and make our recommendations based on what services you require from us. Daily bookkeeping is our standard practice, but you may also want us to create and file your VAT reports, and/or manage your payroll. In these instances, we would need to contact HMRC to register with them as your agent. You should receive a letter from HMRC in about one week to confirm this and allow us access to your account with HMRC.
We’ll be asking for some key information from you at the start
Bank Statements: We will request bank statements from you in order to check the accuracy of your bank feed within Xero.
Credit card statements: If you have any credit cards that require manually uploading – we will be asking for the statements weekly, or monthly, so we can reconcile these accounts.
Data access: Depending on your usage, it may be most convenient for us to have access to your commonly used platforms. Many of our clients provide access to accounts such as email, amazon, paypal, stripe, gocardless etc so that we can extract any necessary information for ourselves.
Bills, invoices and receipts: We use Receipt Bank to help you help us with this process. Our clients overwhelmingly agree that this is an easy and time efficient way to provide us with their receipts and invoices.
We will send you a link with an explanation of how to use Receipt Bank on your computer, tablet or mobile phone. Receipt bank have provided this simple video, explaining how to set it up, so you can use whichever method complements your working style.
What it looks like to work with us on a regular basis
To get a better picture of what it looks like to partner with us, here’s a glance at how we interact with you on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Daily: We check your accounts every single day. Here’s why. Ideally, you would send your invoices, bills and receipts as soon as you have them so that we can reconcile your bank account within Xero. We check everything you send us, and make manual adjustments where necessary. At this stage, we can also set up ‘rules’ to automate routine transactions specific to your business to ensure the process remains as automated and efficient as possible.
Weekly: Once a week we will email you a list of ‘unreconciled items’ – this is a list of unaccounted for payments or receipts from your bank account. We’ll need you to supply any missing paperwork. Many of our clients like us to share a spreadsheet, so they can add details, questions, or anything else they would like us to know. For example – the purpose of any cash that has left the bank.
Quarterly: As part of our commitment to accuracy, Fresh Financials also does a quarterly ‘health check’ on your account. Here’s why. This may result in needing more information from you, perhaps in relation to unpaid bills, or your policy regarding staff expenses. We will also request bank statements or account balances in order to double-check that everything balances and is being represented in the best way for you.
You’ll reach your goals faster when we work in true partnership
You can see that we are committed to providing value with your financial information. We can only provide accurate, timely and relevant information when you provide us with the resources to create it with.
Our team is available for any queries you may have. We are happy to answer questions, or point you in the direction of other resources should you need them. In the event of policy changes, or updated requirements, you will receive an email outlining how this may affect you and detailing any action that needs to be taken.The blogs on our website are also updated with current changes, so you can find further information on a number of relevant topics.
Remember, you’re part of the team too! Together there are always opportunities to find better ways of working. Anything we can do to make this transition easier, we’re here to talk!