Freelance Accountant - Any advice appreciated

lola85

I am hoping someone may be able to provide me with some advice.
I am a qualified accountant, ACA, since 2011. I trained in one of the big 4 in Audit, Financial Services, and am still working in the same area for another financial services company. I am hoping to be able to work from home in the near future and would like to be able to do the accounts for small companies if possible as a freelance accountant. I have a few friends who have set up their own companies and have asked would I be able to help with the books. My concern is although I have the accountancy qualification I do not have the experience and would not want to say yes to something that I am not sure of. I have been looking up advanced bookkeeping courses and taxation courses, as a refreseher for items such as allowable expenses and taxation rules. Would anyone have experience making this change that could offer advice on what I should do to prepare myself for this? Apart from my ACA qualification do I need anything else to be able to provide this service?
Any feedback would be appreciated.

Alan Shore

You need a practicing certificate from your institute.

If you have trained in audit I assume that you have no experience of the small business accounts which are a very different beast, the accounts are the easy part it's the day to day dealing with issues that cause most of the issues and it can be hard for someone coming into it with no experience.

Personally I would not consider working from home as an accountant to be a great choice, perhaps there is a local practice that you could join forces with, don't underestimate the value of having someone in an office to bounce ideas off and you might be able to supplement you income a bit.

dbran

Hi

As Alan said, you need a practicing cert, professional indemnity insurance, annual cpd, probably software and most of all contacts.

Working from home is fine to begin with and can keep the costs down. Only drawback is you may get clients calling to you at times in the evening when you just want to switch off!!

One thing to bear in mind though, doing work for friends has its drawbacks and you should make sure you do have sufficient knowledge to handle any compliance issues that you come across.

Best of luck

dbran

Martin567

Just to clarify, you will need a practising cert if you are going to sign off Accountant's Reports and submit tax returns on behalf of these clients. In other words, be their official agent.

If you were just maintaining their accounting records and preparing everything up to trial balance stage with all the supporting workings, you would not need a practising cert. In such a case, the accounts file prepared by you would be given to a larger office who would review your work, sign off and do the relevant submissions. You could still invoice directly for this type of work without a practising cert.

As the others have said, the type of work you are thinking of doing is very different to your experience up to now. You probably need to give this a lot more thought.