The wife and I are qualified accountants (CIMA & ACCA) but have been ‘non-practising’ in the sense that we’ve been working in Finance for a multi national for >10 years each, and not in the Finance department for a good few years (compliance/risk and project mngt/COO stuff most lately).

We’ve decided to seek a life beyond the daily 9-5 (make that 7-7) and use our ‘skills’ to build a business where we can be in control of our own destiny, spend more time with the kids (i.e. wfh). Ideally we want something we can try and build up while we’re still working. Longer term it’ll hopefully enable us to not have to live near that London in the future.

Accountancy seems to tick the boxes. We’re both still registered/subscribed though our CPDs aren’t up to date. I’ve done no research to date (the idea only came up last night) but my initial thoughts were we could start off small doing tax returns and small company accounts…test the waters as it were with a few evenings/weekends work from home and see where it leads.

Does anyone who’s set up shop have any advice? Pitfalls? Things to avoid? Mistakes you’ve made? Things to be aware of?

“see an accountant?” (sorry)

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I’m self employed with relative simple income streams and I believe my liabilities are simple too but I do not make the time or have the inclination to do my own accounts beyond a bit of basic book keeping. If there was a qualified service that offered real value, I don’t mean cheap but used their mixed experiences to support me and my requirements while making my ‘book keeping’ suitable for HMRC, returns etc I use them but the ‘value’ part of this is critical. Sometimes a 2nd pairs of eyes from a different angle (in your case a financial angle) can be really valuable and something a small business/self employed would pay for.

There are plenty of accountants out there, to a layman it can be a struggle to differentiate them!

Watches with interest…

As you’ve not been working in practice and admitted that your CPD have lapsed you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. Going it alone you will lack the broad experience you would have had from practice work and find yourself researching a lot of information that you may not use again for a year or two. This researching is going to be time consuming and you won’t be getting paid for it either. I would suggest working for a practice to build that experience quicker for the what you will be coming across on a regular basis. You will also get experience on the accounting practice software which you will need again doing everything manually is sole destroying. Going to a few different practices you may come across different software packages so you can choose which you prefer.
The personal touch with clients as well as being up to date with the latest legislation along with what is coming is what really matters. Lots of accountants treat their clients nothing more than cash cows. Taking the time to get your client to understand their accounts and how the business is performing is key to building up relations and helping them to prosper and your fees will increase accordingly with the extra work involved. Clients don’t tend to move from their accountant even a bad one but especially one that is looking after them and taking the time with them. Most of your business will come from word of mouth regardless of how much spend on advertising. A lot of trust is required in picking an accountant and nothing beats recommendation.
For every two good clients you get there will always be another who doesn’t want to pay tax, totally disorganised and leaves everything to the last minute or doesn’t pay you for the services you’ve provided. Cut these lose as soon as you can if you get no improvement from them otherwise they will just be a drain on your precious time.

I’ve a couple of friends that do this, mainly accounts and tax stuff. They also use Xero as a platform and promote that a bit then washup on the side of it their services ( i helped establish xero). There are other platforms but for sme and small contractor businesses having an accountant thats credible AND has business experience would be gold.

my initial thoughts were we could start off small doing tax returns and small company accounts…test the waters as it were with a few evenings/weekends work from home and see where it leads.

The problem with this approach might be that there’s some fixed costs involved with getting established that might make it hard not to lose money – starting with the insurance you’ll need (including professional indemnity if you’re practicing) – there will be movement on scale / turnover, but there’s going to be a basic threshold cost that might be hard to recover just doing a handful of clients ‘on the side’?

CIMA here- I’ve always worked in industry and seem to remember that it’s harder for us to tout for business to the public unlike ACCA & ACA. If its still applicable you may be able to circumvent this by the CIMA working for the ACCA accountant.

BTW- married to an accountant??

So hard resisting the obvious smutty comment…..

Yes, as edlong pointed out, there are lots of fixed costs. As well as professional indemnity insurance, there’s your Money Laundering registration, and the Information Commission registration. Plus the cost of attending courses for CPD. Not easy to start part-time, unfortunately.