Don’t you just love them 
Paying just shy of a grand a year for their services, now they say that they want another £125 + vat per quarter to do my actual bookkeeping side of things for me. Makes you wonder if it’s worth working for a living with these leeches sucking you dry 
A good one should save you a few ££££££’s knowing what they know . Normally save you at least their fees, mine does 
You gotta change accountants penny, up until last year I was paying half that mate.
Why don’t you do your own book keeping/accounts , I used Quickbooks and it’s soooo easy to use mate, you can do everything you need to do and produce all the relavant paperwork needed for year end as well AND save it to disc and give it to him/her to produce everything else he/she needs
Quickbooks is the way to go, for the book keeping anyway - you’re better off with an accountant to do final accounts - to make sure you pay as little tax as possible 
if you can get you books to your accountants on disc you can cut their bill as well
I do all my own books through the year, it really isn’t that difficult, and just use the accountant for the year end stuff which costs me £300. I just keep track of my invoices, purchases and petty cash using simple spreadsheets in Excel. That coupled with Money for keeping track of bank/credit card accounts is all that is really needed. Go to somewhere like Staples or Office World and have a look at the accounts books they sell, taking note of what details they include, then reproduce it in a spreadsheet program. Save yourself a good few quid that way.
I use to use the accountant for everything but he was double dear (£250 for a vat return come to think of it he charged me £250 for anything 
) but then I started doing my own vat and he told n
me to get quickbooks (I used a weekly accounting book from w.h smith before) so I went out and bought it from p.c world and went out of business 2 weeks later before I got a chance to use it.
Now I’ve started self employment again I started using it just before xmas only trouble is now I cant get access to it because it is refusing me entry
Just done my first VAT return with the accountants and it turns out that it was wrong If you know the VAT return in box 9 it states to put down items purchased whilst abroad. My accountant’s assistant (beautiful lass only 23 ) said to put everything that I’d bought in Europe in box 9, fuel/tolls ect, however, it now appears that this was wrong advice (which she has now admitted) - it is only for items bought and returned to UK. So now I’ve got to sort that out after been on phone with HMRC for half an hour.
My head hurts
penfold:
Just done my first VAT return with the accountants and it turns out that it was wrong
My head hurts
That’s what I like to see “professionals” earning their money just like the solicitor that just took 4 months to process the sale of mu girlfriends flat.
Same firm of solicitors for both sides and the buyers were cash investors
I do all my own, use MYOB and find it quite easy, much easier to keep track of who owes me money and the VAT is all done for me, all I have to do each qtr is print it out and copy accross the figures from the boxes - easy.
penfold:
Just done my first VAT return with the accountants and it turns out that it was wrong
My head hurts
You should send a bill to your accountants for your time and the cost of the phone calls in sorting this out, they would be billing you if it had been your mistake they were sorting out.
The VAT on things like road tolls and fuel purchases abroad is not claimed back through your UK VAT return, for a start each country has a different VAT rate, but is claimed from each country.The easiest way to do this is to get yourself an agent who will do all the work for you for a percentage of what they claim back, typically around the 10% mark. There are lots of forms that need to be filled in in various languages so the commission they take is well worth it. I use a firm in Denmark but there are also UK based firms who provide this service. All you will need to do is to get HMRC to issue you with some VAT 66 forms now and again, which takes no more effort than dropping them an email, and the agent you use does the rest. Whatever you do don’t put those purchases through your UK VAT return otherwise the crap will hit the air conditioning big time when HMRC find out.