We’re calling this service BankBolt, and from today it is available for customers of Cater Allen, HSBC, RBS and NatWest. You can activate it in the Crunch Connect dashboard for your bank of choice.

Safety First

There are a few plug-and-play solutions out there for bank feeds, however after checking them out we weren’t satisfied with the risks involved. For these solutions to work, users must hand over their online banking login details and allow third-party software to access their accounts. This is, to put it mildly, a big security no-no.

With BankBolt you’ll never have to hand over login credentials, and all your transactions will be accessed via a read-only feed, so there’s no security risk to you or your money. We first wrote about these issues over a year ago when we launched our first feed with Cater Allen, and making sure we get the security right has been our number one priority when putting together our new BankBolt service.

Fees

Wherever possible we try to make Crunch an all-inclusive service – for example our recent RTI upgrade was completely seamless and free for all users. Unfortunately in this case we’re dealing with High Street banks and, well, they don’t get out of bed unless they can make a few quid from it. For HSBC, RBS and NatWest customers there will be an additional £5.50 per month fee for BankBolt, while the Cater Allen feed will remain free of charge due to the closer relationship we enjoy with them.

We think this is great value for the Crunch clients who will get the most utility from the service, and it will be automatically added to your monthly Direct Debit when you activate the service on your account.

BankBolt is available to all clients as of this morning. You can find more information on how to get started in the Help Centre. Happy reconciliation and as always, if you have any questions, ask away!

Photo by Anonymous

The post Introducing BankBolt – our totally secure bank feeds appeared first on Crunch.

Free domain name and hosting with Easyspace!

One of our fantastic new partners, Easyspace offer just about everything you need to manage your own website. To get you started, how about a free .com or .net domain name, and free hosting?

To get started, visit Easyspace’s partner page and click the link on the right.

Free business cards from MOO!

You’ll probably have heard of MOO.com. The Shoreditch-based printing company have taken the sleepy world of business cards by storm, and we love them for it! We recently had the pleasure of co-hosting an accountancy workshop at their shop in the Shoreditch Boxpark. If you want to give their fantastic business cards a try, you can get 100 totally free.

To get your business cards, click the offer link on our partner page.

Free consultancy from Paradigm!

If you’re after some personal tax advice look no further than Paradigm, experts in all aspects of financial planning. They even wrote some brilliant personal tax tips for us earlier in the year! Paradigm are offering all Crunch clients a totally free consultation to see if they can help with your personal finances – either over the phone, or at their offices (just down the road from our own!) in Hove.

Visit their partner page for details of how to get your free consultation.

There are loads of other freebies and discounts available from our partners – check them all out here!

The post Freebies you can get through our partners appeared first on Crunch.

The younger Da Rocha, Dan, operates two limited companies with us. The first, Mudvark, produces mobile games, while the second, Toxic Games, was set up with two University friends after receiving funding from Indie Fund to develop a desktop game called Qube.

While Qube was in development Dan and his fellow directors managed their relatively simple finances with spreadsheets, but in the run-up to launch they knew they needed a better system, so in late 2011 went looking for a modern accountancy solution, and found us!

“We knew our finances were about to get much more complicated as we were just about to receive our first income, so we decided it was time to get an accountant.”

Dan speaks to his account manager Charley on a monthly basis, and found her advice indispensable when it came time for Mudvark to take on its first employee.

Dan and his fellow directors at Toxic make use of our Snap and Mile Cruncher apps to easily record their business expenses, and love our everything-under-one-roof approach to small business accounting.

“I think my favourite feature is probably everything working together. Seeing it all in one place is really convenient, especially with a company with several directors. It’s almost fun; far better than a musty old accountants’ office!”

Dan was so impressed with our service that he recommended us to his Dad, Gene, who came on board in August 2012. Of course, they made sure to get their Crunch² referral vouchers.

Having formed his company, Voxstar, in 2010, Gene began using a traditional accountant, but was frustrated at having to wait until the end of every financial year to find out his tax liabilities.

“Everything being done a year in arrears meant I never knew how much money I really had. I’d have plenty sitting in the bank, but then my accountant would tell me I needed most of it to pay my tax bill! When their prices started to creep up I started looking around, and Dan recommended Crunch.”

Gene has found moving from a traditional accountant to an online service a refreshing change of pace, and regularly accesses his accounts from his desktop, iPad and smartphone.

“My account manager Johnny was really helpful when I first came on board. I was part way through my financial year and he helped me figure out my VAT returns and Year End filings.”

We spend more hours that we’d care to admit making sure our clients are as happy as can be, and recommending our services to a family member is just about the best endorsement we could hope for!

The post Case study – Meet the Da Rochas! appeared first on Crunch.

Book your ticket now!

The post Tuesday 21st May appeared first on Crunch.

What is a Year End, anyway?

A ‘Year End’ is accountancy slang for the documents a limited company must file with HMRC and Companies House at the end of every financial year. What you must file depends on your company, but a Year End will always include two documents.

Corporation Tax Return (CT600)

Filed with: HMRC

Contains: Broadly speaking, details of your company’s income minus any tax allowances and expenses. The remaining figure – your profits – will then be used to calculate how much Corporation Tax your company owes.

Abbreviated Accounts

Filed with: Companies House

Contains: Details about your company finances which must be made public in accordance with the Companies Act 2006. This includes cash held in the company, assets, debtors and creditors.

What should I do to get ready?

Much like buying toilet roll, preparing for your Year End is not something you should leave until the last minute. Before you can prepare your CT600 and Abbreviated Accounts there a few bits of housekeeping you need to take care of.

Get your expenses in order

Every Pound you claim as a legitimate business expense is a Pound off your company profits, and less profit means less Corporation Tax to pay. Before your Year End make sure you’ve claimed for each and every expense you can. Not sure if you can claim something? HMRC’s rule is expenses must be “wholly and exclusively” for business use, so if you bought something for your business – no matter how bizarre – you can probably claim it as an expense.

Round up those overdue invoices

Your Year End should be as accurate as possible, so turn debt collector a few weeks beforehand and chase up any unpaid invoices you may have. Once you have the money in your company bank account you can record it properly, and reconcile your accounts in your accounting software, making sure they’re 100% accurate.

Collect all your paperwork

As we’re always saying, accounts don’t mean squat without records to back them up. Before filing your Year End make sure you have records for everything – this can mean getting statements of account from suppliers, bank and credit card statements from financial institutions, and records of any other income you receive.

What else do I need to think about?

VAT Returns

If your company is VAT Registered (on either the Flat Rate or Standard scheme) you will most likely have a VAT Return due at the same time as your Year End. VAT Returns aren’t often thought of as part of a Year End, but they usually coincide with one. Make sure you don’t panic about your Year End and forget to file your VAT!

Annual Return

You should also think about your Annual Return. This is due 28 days after the beginning of your new company year, and is basically a summary of your company details. It includes company name and registration number, details of directors and shareholders, registered address and trading activity.

Financial Planning

The run-up to your Year End is the perfect time to think about some financial and tax planning, to help minimise your tax bill in the immediate future, and also the long-term. This can include paying money into ISAs, bringing your spouse or partner into your business, or channeling some of your income into a pension.

Review your suppliers

It’s a great idea to review your service providers once a year anyway to make sure you’re getting value for money – why not do it at your Year End? That way you can ditch any overpriced or unneeded suppliers and start afresh in the new financial year!

What happens if I miss the deadline?

To encourage limited companies to file their CT600 and Abbreviated Accounts on time, HMRC and Companies House have penalty regimes for those who miss the deadline. These penalties increase with time, so if you’re continually tardy to the filing party you can expect it to cost you dearly!

CT600 late filing penalties

Abbreviated Accounts late filing penalties

Stack of Books designed by Cengiz SARI, Receipt designed by Kevin Kwok & Price Tag from The Noun Project

The post Year End checklist for limited companies appeared first on Crunch.

A common question posed this time of year is “What expenses can I claim when I go to a conference?”. Well, the good news is that – provided the conference is for business purposes, and not to indulge your passion for philately - the majority of the expenses you incur will be legitimate business expenses which you can reclaim.

HMRC does not issue definitive lists of allowable expenses, on the basis that every business’ needs will vary, and a totally superfluous luxury for one freelancer may be an everyday necessity for another. Instead they provide guidance on what you should and shouldn’t claim. The rule of thumb for business expenses is that they must be “wholly and exclusively” used for your business.

For business conferences, this means the cost of tickets are covered, as is travel to and from where the conference is taking place (although bear in mind HMRC may begin to raise eyebrows if you try to claim First Class return airfare – see their guidance here) and accommodation for the duration of the conference. Again, keep the “wholly and exclusively” rule in mind - you’ll be causing trouble for yourself if you claim for a week at the Mandarin Oriental to attend a 2-day telesales conference in Croydon (more HMRC guidance here).

At a conference food expenses are covered, plus any day-to-day costs such as hotel Wifi or taxi fares. Keep in mind alcohol is not an allowable expense, no matter how much you might need a drink after a long day on the show floor.

Our company formation site GoLimited has a useful list of some allowable expenses to give you a more general idea of claimable items.

Records, records, records!

Legally all expense receipts must be kept for six years, and if you’re one of the lucky few selected for an HMRC investigation you must provide invoices, receipts and records for every single claim you’ve made. It’s important to remember to get a receipt for absolutely everything (cab rides in particular are often overlooked) and store them somewhere safe. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever bought a rail season ticket will tell you, receipt will fade to nothingness in just a few months, let alone six years!

This is where our handy expense attachments become invaluable. Simply take a picture of a receipt and upload it as an attachment to an expense and we’ll keep it safe for you.

Even better, let us record your expenses for you with Snap and Mile Cruncher!

We love a good conference, and encourage anyone and everyone to get themselves along to events covering their sector. Plus, they’re that much more enjoyable when you know the cost is being offset against your Corporation Tax!

Photo by LeWeb

The post Conference season is upon us – make sure you’re tax efficient! appeared first on Crunch.

Cashflow is often a very personal issue for freelancers, contractors and SMEs, and can sometimes mean the difference between making and missing this month’s rent, or being able to afford to eat.

While clients might not care about your financial problems (and more than likely you will not want to discuss it with them), that doesn’t mean they don’t matter. Luckily, the recently-introduced Late Payments Directive gives you more power than ever when taking action on unpaid invoices.

Under the new laws you no longer need to specify payment deadlines, and you can include additional charges in the amount you claim back from a delinquent client.

No deadlines

It’s best practice to agree strict payment deadlines (as well as any late payment penalties) before you begin working for a new client. However you might not always do so, depending on the nature of your business.

Under the updated legislation, the payment deadline on most invoices is set at thirty days from the date the contract is completed (meaning the day you deliver the goods or services you were hired for), even if no payment schedule is decided upon before work begins.

That means there will be no doubt over when your invoice is due to be settled – unless you agree to longer terms upfront. However, there is no reason you should be forced into accepting your client’s payment terms retrospectively if they are too long to be practical.

What additional costs can I claim?

There are three costs you can now add to overdue invoices. Two were already set out in law, and one is new as of March 16th.

Statutory interest at 8% above the Bank of England base rate can be added on the most recent of either December 31st or June 30th; so, for example, if you are in the first six months of the year and the base rate on December 31st was 0.5%, you can charge interest at 8.5% from the day the invoice became overdue. For reference, the base rate is currently at 0.5%.

Fixed fees can also be added to the total amount owed:

• £40 for debts up to £999.99
• £70 from £1,000 to £9,999.99
• £100 for £10,000 and above.

If the cost of chasing your payment is greater than the fixed fee you are eligible to claim, you can also claim back the extra expense as reasonable costs, which should mean you are never left out of pocket for chasing a payment.

So what’s new?

The right to claim ‘reasonable costs’ of debt recovery was not previously enshrined in law. This meant smaller businesses faced the dilemma of whether the likely charges involved in chasing a payment would mean it was not worth their time. Now that financial burden has been rightly shifted on to the non-paying client.

For freelancers and contractors who take a hard-line approach to delinquent clients, the updated legislation could be seen as a licence to act with impunity, safe in the knowledge that any overdue invoices can be chased without incurring excessive costs.

You can see the full Government guidance here (PDF).

The post Updated late payment laws – what does it mean for you? appeared first on Crunch.

An initiative designed to help creatives build their businesses, an abundance of seasoned entrepreneurs took part, eager to provide their expertise and help the assorted startups on their way.

As you might expect as the MD of Crunch I was brought along to speak about business finance matters; my talk ‘How to make a profitable and tax-efficient business’ aimed at helping creative start ups with the fundamentals of cashflow and making their businesses really work.

Speaking to a room of around 80 people, I pointed to the benefits of going limited and delivered  a crash course on cash flow management, drawing upon my own experiences from setting up of Crunch. Aware I was speaking to an audience of a more creative inclination, I also reiterated the importance of selling and went through various aspects of the sales process. This is a vital part of business development and one often overlooked by freelancers and new businesses!

A few people have been in touch since the presentation, and I’m pointing them in the right direction for their businesses, helping them where I can to take their startups to the next level.

Aside from the talks, the showcase weekend offered creatives with the chance  to pitch to the likes of Doug Richards, take part in workshops and sell their wares to attendees. Two startups I was particularly impressed with were the design company Raw Studio and Miles Campbell, a clockmaker who’s currently in the process of launching his website.

In fact, so impressed was I with Raw Studio’s hanging chair design that I’ll be placing an order shortly!

All in all it was a great weekend and I’d highly recommend it to any Crunch client looking to build upon their business knowledge or our more creative clients looking to reach a new customer base.

Next up, I’ll be at Digital Shoreditch speaking once again on business fundamentals – getting the cash in the door, managing cashflow and working smarter. Come along if you’re in the area!

The post A visit to the School for Creative Startups appeared first on Crunch.

Now that we’re all grown up we’ve been lucky enough to have been featured in just about every big national newspaper, a slew of industry magazines and a bunch of trade press. Print media is inherently an unknown quantity – it doesn’t have the lovely trackability of links, so to work out its impact you have to guestimate a bit (unless you want to do something daft like use a QR Code). We’ve been looking at how much impact various media outlets had on our website traffic, and we thought we’d publish the results here for anyone who is interested.

For this exercise we’ll be comparing average non-referral website traffic (i.e. traffic that arrived directly or through a search engine) for the relevant period to the non-referral website traffic on the five days after we appeared in various publications. It’s not the perfect way to measure their impact, but it’ll do.

Which will cause the biggest spike in traffic? Place your bets now!

Sunday Times

In June 2012 we recorded a 15% traffic increase after featuring in the Sunday Times, a newspaper with a circulation of about 900,000. Not bad, although I’m sure we can do better.

The Guardian

In August 2011 we were mentioned in a Guardian feature on becoming a successful freelancer (they know how to spot a good accountant when they see one, those Guardian journos) and registered a noticeable shift in traffic (more people visiting us at the weekend – i.e. during their downtime when they’d most likely read a newspaper), although it only amounted to a 5% overall increase. As a daily newspaper the Guardian only sees a circulation of around 200,000 – less than a quarter of the Sunday Times readership, so our traffic bumps seem to be more-or-less proportional so far.

Daily Mail

Earlier this year a survey we ran about Self Assessment readiness amongst small business owners made its way into the Daily Mail. With a circulation of 1.8 million the Mail is the biggest daily out there, so we were rather pleased with ourselves. Unfortunately, our inclusion in the Mail actually coincided with a 6% drop in our average traffic for that period.

We put the lack of traffic boost down to the fact that Mail readers tend to be a little older (the vast majority over 55, according to their own figures) and most likely not interested in online accounting services. The drop we’re currently attributing to some kind of karmic punishment.

Telegraph

In July last year we contributed to a Telegraph feature on employing graduates (we employ loads through our accounting apprenticeship scheme, so it’s a subject we know a thing or two about). The Telegraph, despite its daily circulation of over half a million, had no noticeable impact on our website traffic.

For the five days subsequent to the article being published we registered an overall improvement of 5%, although as you can see from the graph this all came on the fifth day, so most likely couldn’t be attributed to the Telegraph piece.

Telegraph & Sunday Times double-whammy

Earlier this month we scored a bit of a coup by appearing on the front page of the Telegraph on April 6th, and the Business section of the Sunday Times just two days later. This one-two punch of print media goodness had the most noticeable affect on our website traffic, and we recorded a 21% increase for that period. Tidily, this almost exactly matches the combined impact of the two separate Sunday Times and Telegraph mentions above.

Mainstream media vs. trade press

Although inclusion in national newspapers is nice for bragging rights and slapping a few logos on your website (protip: don’t use the Financial Times, Mail or Telegraph logos – they’re very precious about their copyright), as you can see above it doesn’t have an earth-shattering impact on website traffic. It’s worth noting to a certain extent we’re hamstrung by our industry – who wants to visit the website of an accountant?

We’ve had more noticeable success by targeting publications that we know are read by our clients. We look after thousands of designers and developers, and when we featured in .net magazine we saw a noticeable bump for the first fortnight of publication. Similarly, when we appeared in the newsletter on our good friends MOO, or website traffic looked like this -

Food for thought

Hopefully companies weighing up a PR spend will find this little stroll down Fleet Street useful. Remember though, you should never discount the mainstream media just because they don’t drive shedloads of traffic. Brand awareness, social proof and relationships with journalists are all things that can prove very useful further down the road. For those with a tight or non-existent PR budget, though, targeting outlets that you know are read by your customers can demonstrably provide a better return on investment.

The post How much traffic can a startup get from a national newspaper mention? appeared first on Crunch.

After almost ten days of operation, we thought now would be a good time to let our clients know how everything is going.

Teething problems

RTI filings were initially fairly slow when we turned our system on – we presume HMRC was using some kind of load management to make sure their Gateway wasn’t swamped. Although we’ve not seen any issues on our end AccountingWeb reported on the problems other payroll firms were experiencing – one exasperated software provider even calling for Lin Homer’s head.

RTI’s launch was further complicated by a half-day strike called by the PCS Union (many of their members are customer-facing HMRC staff) on Monday morning – the first business hours post-RTI. HMRC’s phone lines remained swamped for most of the early part of the week, as did special RTI hotlines set up by the larger payroll software providers.

Smooth sailing

Despite the problems, HMRC reported that around 70,000 RTI filings were successfully made over the first weekend of operation. Around 200 of our clients have made RTI filings so far, and we’ve yet to see any major issues. We’re keeping a close eye on proceedings but so far, as Andy from our development team puts it, things are going “smoother than we ever could have expected.”

As always, if you have any questions about RTI,  how we’re dealing with it, or what it means for your business, leave a comment below and we’ll do our best to answer.

Photo by Gordon Wrigley

The post RTI one week on – a quick update appeared first on Crunch.