It’s a French saying that means that keeping good accounts makes for good friendships.
Usually this means that debts should be settled promptly. I’ve written before about how important this is in the business world whether you’re the one paying promptly or ensuring that your clients pay you on time.
But it could also be used to talk about the quality of your accounts and the importance of keeping them up to date. And this is why I’m (broadly) in favour of MTD (Making Tax Digital) which finally goes live in April with the requirement for maintaining digital records and making quarterly submissions to HMRC.
The benefits I see are:
- Up to date information for decision making, debt collection, and just knowing roughly how much tax is due, and how much the business owner can take for themselves. Anybody who has dealt with the extortionate rate of ‘penalty’ tax on overdrawn directors’ loan accounts will understand the importance of this.
- Faster year end accounts when seeking finance or renewing mortgages.
- Processing bills faster with the use of technology just by taking a photograph or forwarding an email. No more mourning over lost receipts, without which VAT can’t be claimed.
- Tools to store receipts electronically and saving the need to print out paper invoices which frees up space and is much better environmentally
- Faster cash collection with recurring invoices, prompt invoicing from a phone, connecting to direct debit software, or card reader apps on your phone.
And I believe, with such a tech savvy nation, this is the time for it. Most people have a smart phone on which to take photos of their children or their receipts to upload into bookkeeping software (the receipts, not the kids although we don’t mind seeing pics of the latter too) to be processed by the business owner or bookkeeper with the help of AI suggestions.
Up to date record keeping will allow accountants to provide much more proactive support to clients and, as somebody who likes to see my clients thriving, I’m looking forward to it. No more websites with the empty promise that ‘we’re PROACTIVE accountants’; it’s about to become reality.