Most of the people we act for as small business accountants in North London are entrepreneurs in the plain sense: the person who owns the business also sells, delivers, chases the invoices and decides what happens next. The accounting has to fit around that. It needs to answer the owner’s questions, not produce a set of figures once a year that nobody reads.

The business and the owner are taxed together

For an owner-managed business, the useful question is rarely what the business owes on its own. It is what reaches you personally, after every tax on the way. A sole trader pays income tax on the whole profit, with the £12,570 personal allowance, 20% up to £50,270 and 40% above it. A company pays corporation tax first and you pay tax again on what you take out. Once your income passes £100,000 the personal allowance starts tapering away, and it has gone entirely at £125,140. That band is where a pension contribution or a change in how profit is drawn saves the most. We look at both sides together, because advice that only covers one of them misses the point.

When you run more than one business

Entrepreneurs seldom stop at one venture. A second business, a rental flat bought through the first company, a partner who joins part-way through: each of these changes the structure question. It is often cheaper to keep a new idea inside the existing company for its first year than to form another one straight away. In other cases the risk is exactly what should be kept apart. We work that through with you before anything is registered, not after the second set of accounts arrives.

Business accountants who talk about the business

Our business accountants in North London spend the conversation on the questions owners actually ask. Can I afford the unit on the high street? Is the new contract worth the extra staff? Should I take more out this year or leave it in? Those questions come up in Finchley, Barnet, Enfield and Haringey all year round, not only at the year end.

Plenty of small businesses need a bookkeeper in North London before they need anything else. When the books are current, every other job gets cheaper and quicker: the VAT return, the year-end accounts, the tax estimate, the answer to “how are we doing”. When they are six months behind, all of those turn into reconstruction work.

What the bookkeeping covers

• Bank and card transactions reconciled, so the software agrees with the bank to the penny
• Sales invoices and receipts matched, so you can see who owes you and for how long
• Supplier bills and receipts recorded with the right VAT treatment
• Payroll and pension journals posted after each pay run
• A short monthly or quarterly summary of profit, cash and what is owed to HMRC

Why it now has to run during the year

Every VAT-registered business already has to keep digital records and file through Making Tax Digital software. From 6 April 2026 the same approach applies to income tax for sole traders and landlords with qualifying income over £50,000. The threshold falls to £30,000 from April 2027 and £20,000 from April 2028, and those in scope send quarterly updates. A box of receipts sorted in January no longer meets the rules for a growing number of North London businesses.

• Bookkeeping services
• VAT services
• Making Tax Digital for individuals

The compliance list is the same for everyone and it is not the interesting part: annual accounts, a corporation tax return, VAT returns if you are registered, payroll if you have staff, and a confirmation statement. We do all of that as a matter of course. What changes the business is the layer above it.

• Whether your gross margin is holding, and what moved it
• Which customers or products actually make money after the work involved
• What the tax bill will be, before the money has been spent
• Whether to take profit as salary, dividend or pension contribution this year
• When registering for VAT stops being optional, and what it does to your prices

The two points where small businesses most often come unstuck are the first employee and the VAT threshold. The first brings PAYE, auto-enrolment, employer National Insurance and employment law obligations that arrive all at once. The second can cost you a fifth of your prices overnight if your customers are consumers who cannot recover the VAT. Both are much easier handled a month early than a month late.

You get a named accountant, fees agreed in writing before work starts, and replies within a working day. We are in Finchley, so meeting in person is practical if that is what you want — but you can deal with us entirely by email and phone, and we would rather be quick than formal.

The first hire brings a set of obligations that arrive all at once and mostly before the first payday: a PAYE scheme, real-time reporting to HMRC on or before each payment, a workplace pension with automatic enrolment, employer's liability insurance, and a written statement of terms on day one.

The employment allowance reduces the employer's National Insurance bill for most smaller employers, and it has to be claimed rather than applied — a surprising number of first-time employers never do.

Auto-enrolment is the one that catches people, because it is assessed every pay period rather than once. Someone who was not eligible last month can become eligible this month through a pay rise or extra hours, and the duty starts then.

Xero, QuickBooks and FreeAgent all do the job for a small business, and the differences that matter are not the ones in the marketing. What decides it is usually whether it connects cleanly to your bank, whether it handles the thing your trade actually does — CIS, stock, projects, multi-currency — and whether you will genuinely use it.

The most expensive choice is the one that gets abandoned in month three, leaving a year to rebuild. If you are not going to keep it up, it is better to say so and have us do the bookkeeping than to pay for software that is used once.

• Payroll
• Bookkeeping
• Accountants in North London

Small businesses very often know their turnover and their bank balance and nothing in between, and those two figures can both look reassuring while the business is losing money. Three ideas fix most of it, and none of them requires an accounting qualification.

Your own drawings are not a cost

If you are a sole trader, what you take out of the business is not an expense — it is a share of the profit, and you are taxed on the profit whether you took it or left it in. This is the single most common misunderstanding we correct, and it matters because a business that treats the owner’s pay as a cost concludes it is breaking even when it is in fact making a profit it will owe tax on.

Gross margin tells you more than turnover

The number that governs whether a business works is what is left after the direct cost of what you sold — materials, stock, subcontractors, the things that rise when you sell more. Overheads are largely fixed; gross margin is the part you can act on. A business chasing turnover with a margin too thin to cover its overheads simply loses money faster as it grows.

Know your break-even

Overheads divided by gross margin percentage gives the turnover you need before you earn anything. It takes ten minutes to calculate and most owners have never seen it for their own business. It converts vague questions — can I afford to hire someone, should I take that unit — into arithmetic, because you can see exactly how much extra trade the commitment demands.

Then price deliberately

Most small businesses under-price, and put the difficulty down to competition when the actual problem is that the price never covered the work. Once you know your margin and your break-even you can tell the difference between a competitor who is cheaper and a competitor who is losing money. It is a much better position from which to decide anything.

This page covers the day-to-day accounting that small businesses and entrepreneurs need: bookkeeping, VAT, payroll, year-end accounts and the planning around them. If you are looking for the wider practice — personal tax, landlords, trusts, or an accountant for a specific North London neighbourhood — our page on accountants in North London sets out everything we do and the areas we cover.

• Accountants in North London
• Limited company accountant, North London
• Start-up accountant
• Business consultancy

The services we provide for small businesses include year-end accounts and corporation tax and business start-up. Each has its own page with what is included and how we work.