Corby's unit of account is the tonne, and most books here are kept as though it were the invoice. Stock valuation, scrap recovery, yield and job costing, monthly, by a CIMA-qualified Chartered Management Accountant. £95 to £1,250 + VAT a month, published.
Book a 30-minute review →Stewarts and Lloyds poured Corby's first steel in October 1935 and built a town around the works. The end of steelmaking was announced in May 1979: over 5,000 jobs gone by the close of 1981, eventually 11,000, unemployment above 30%. The Scottish and Irish families who came for the work left the name Little Scotland behind — the 2001 Census still recorded 18.9% of the urban area as Scottish-born.
But the metal never left. Tube making carried on through the closures, fed by rail from Teesside and later Port Talbot. Tata Steel runs four mills on the Corby site and, under a £30m programme, has replaced one cold mill with a line making around 300,000 tonnes a year of cold-formed structural tube in round and rectangular section. Food production grew up alongside: Weetos are made in the north of the town, Taste Original has produced cooked meat snacks here since 1988, and Amy's Kitchen built a factory here. The station that opened on 23 February 2009 restored a half-hourly service to St Pancras.
None of those names is the client. The clients sit beneath them on Earlstrees and Weldon North: the stockholder cutting to length, the fabricator, the sub-contract machinist, the food packer on two shifts, the engineering firm with four CNC machines and a tooling bill nobody has capitalised.
Commodity prices move faster than a year-end stocktake. Stock belongs at the lower of cost and net realisable value, tested at each reporting date: a rack of coil or tube bought at one quarter's price and still there two quarters later is worth what it would now fetch, less selling cost. Tested annually, a falling market arrives as a write-down. Tested monthly, it arrives as a margin signal while the order book can still be repriced.
Weighbridge tickets paid at odd intervals and posted to sundry income at the foot of the profit and loss account. That hides the true cost of the job, because the recovery belongs against the material it came from, and it hides the yield. A fabricator losing twelve per cent to offcut rather than six has a costing fault worth more than the scrap cheque, and no line called scrap sales will show it.
Material bought by the tonne, converted into lengths or sections, invoiced per item. Where the two measures are never reconciled, stock quantity drifts and nobody can say whether the gap is theft, scrap, mis-cut or a conversion factor typed in wrong years ago. Weight in against weight out, monthly, settles it.
Holding three months of steel is a funding decision. Where it sits on invoice discounting or stock finance, the cost of carrying that metal belongs in gross margin, not in interest below the line. Price a cut-to-length job without it and the job reads as profitable when it is not.
Raw input, trim, giveaway on weight, rejected batches and short-dated stock all land in one purchases line. Pull them apart and cost per unit becomes a real number — the only basis on which a retailer's price demand can be answered with better than a guess. Short shelf life needs an allowance against stock, not invoice cost held until it is thrown out.
A night shift costs more per unit than a day shift, agency cover more again, and holiday pay accruals on a seasonal pattern are routinely missing altogether. Split labour by shift and premium and which pattern is worth running has an answer.
Most food is zero-rated, but confectionery, savoury snacks, hot food and some drinks are not, and that boundary has produced decades of VAT litigation. A business making both needs product codes mapped to the right rate at the point of sale rather than corrected at return time. Getting it wrong is not a rounding error; it is a four-year assessment.
A sub-contract engineering firm quotes on estimated hours, buys material in, books labour loosely or not at all, then invoices on completion. The owner then knows the company made money in total, and nothing about which jobs made it. Two faults cause most of that: work in progress guessed at once a year instead of built from job cards, and a labour recovery rate untouched since two pay rounds ago. Costing jobs as they run fixes both.
Tooling is the other. Jigs, fixtures and dedicated tooling used across several production runs generally belong on the balance sheet, depreciated over the work they support — expensed on purchase they ruin the month they land in and flatter every month after. A customer contribution towards tooling spreads over the same periods rather than counting as revenue on receipt. Bills of materials and real stock control are why some Corby engineering firms are better left on Sage 200 than migrated; the manufacturing costing page goes further.
Four tiers, fixed, by Direct Debit, agreed in writing first. Bookkeeping and VAT alone is Essentials, £95 + VAT a month. Add the year end and the CT600 for Essentials + Books, £195. Management accounts and commentary make it Managed, £395. Finance Director is £1,250. Overdue years are £450 + VAT each. Nothing is billed by the hour.
Two things are refused on principle: statutory and external audit, where a company past the thresholds goes to a registered audit firm rather than being kept on, and specialist tax — R&D claims, capital allowances on major plant, customs and duty on imported steel. The price list has the rest.
The practice is Northamptonshire-based, and that is as specific as it gets. Nobody walks into an accountant's reception in a town built around industrial estates, and a town-centre lease would only end up in the fee. Work happens on your existing Xero or Sage, though a stock count on Earlstrees is better done standing in the unit. Corby, Weldon, Great Oakley, Gretton and the villages north towards the Welland are covered, as is the rest of North Northamptonshire. Other towns: Kettering, Wellingborough, Rushden, Northampton, Stamford, Daventry. See everywhere we work.
Peter Edwards ACMA CGMA, and nobody else. Chartered Management Accountant, CIMA Member in Practice, 25 years in finance. What matters for a Corby manufacturer is where that time went: Head of Finance at a pharmaceutical wholesaler through growth from £3m to £10m, where valuing and tracing stock was the job itself; a £13m publishing and media group with an ecommerce arm; a £15m software company; and earlier, Responsible Financial Officer at a town council.
Seven questions, answerable from memory. Nothing to log into, nothing to export. What comes back is a straight view on whether your stock, debtors and VAT figures are reliable.
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