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Effective and clear communication is essential for maintaining a productive and harmonious work environment Here are 27 of the worst behaviours which cause communication to fail — and what you can do to prevent them from having a negative influence on your business. Bought to you by Clear Books.

1. Hiding information

Obviously, everyone doesn’t need to know everything, but if staff feel like a new bombshell is dropped on them every day, morale will decrease and, in turn, perhaps they’ll start …

The new rules on salary sacrifice are coming into play on 6th April 2017 are you up to date on the changes? Here is a quick overview of what to expect,

Salary sacrifice for pension, Direct employer contracted childcare, Cycle to work, childcare vouchers, workplace nurseries and cars with emissions below 75g CO2 / km will all remain unaffected and employees will still continue to benefit.

Some of the benefits that you will see an impact on are Cars, Mobile phones, Workplace parking and white goods.…

Are you worried that your website isn't doing its job? You see the visitors land on your page, but they never take up your offer of a free consultation? What's going wrong?

You know that if you could speak to to visitor you could explain what you do so much better than the words on your site. As bookkeepers we're great at converting people when we speak to them, and even more when we meet them face to face. So how do we do that?

First, you need to lose the free consultation offer. I've said i…

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Are you looking to develop your own bookkeeping practice in 2017?

Would …

HMRC run regular webinars around the most asked questions by bookkeepers and other tax professionals.  They have helpfully provided us with a list of forthcoming sessions to share with you.

Capital Allowances and Vehicles

This meeting mainly covers the special rules for cars and vans. This is a popular subject so we are running two meetings.

Wednesday 18 January 11am to midday Register now for this meeting

Wednesday 18 January 1pm to 2pm Register now for this meeting

Basis Periods

This meeting will lo…

I am often asked by my clients, many of whom are bookkeepers and accountants, why it is important to have tailored letters of engagement with their clients. Letters of engagement are the written contracts between bookkeepers and accountants and their clients to provide their services to their clients.

Why have a contract at all?

This is a question that is asked time and time again, and one I think should be addressed before we move onto the issue of why bookkeepers and accountants should have tai…

Many bookkeepers will want to help their small and micro payroll clients through the automatic enrolment (AE) process. If your client employs at least one member of staff then they will have AE duties to perform. If an employer has eligible jobholders they must act to enrol them into a qualifying AE pension scheme at the staging date.

If an employer has non-eligible or entitled workers, then the employer does not have to set up a pension scheme. Both non-eligible jobholders and entitled workers …

I have spoken to many bookkeepers over the years who would like to charge their clients a fixed monthly fee but are filled with fear.  I hope this short post will help you put those fears you feel to one side and look seriously at how charging a fixed fee could help your business to grow.

Most fears tend to come from a single area.  Bookkeepers fear that they will end up providing far more services than the client pays for.

Charging clients a fixed monthly fee is a fantastic way to:

• Earn more m…

One of questions I get asked most often is ‘How do I come up with a fixed price?’  When a bookkeeper, like yourself, stops selling their time and start selling their expertise this is the biggest hurdle they will face.  How do you remain competitive and avoid working for nothing.

One of the easiest ways to devise a fixed price, while still retaining the link to time, is to work out how long it takes you, on average, to deal with a client’s transaction.  You should include in this calculation the …

When you set up your own bookkeeping practice it is vitally important to get to grips with just who your ideal client is.  This will be determined a lot by how you want to work, onsite or offsite, hourly or fixed rates, locally or remote and loads of other questions you need to answer first.

If you don’t know who you are marketing your services to, it will be really difficult to find them, and very expensive.  You’ll end up with the scattergun approach which will leave you trying to be everything…