Kettering trade is physical: pallets of ingredients, fabricated steel, part-finished jobs, a yard full of vehicles. The books here go wrong in predictable places — stock valuation, work in progress, fuel and fleet, and contract margin nobody measures until the year end. Monthly bookkeeping, VAT and management accounts from a Chartered Management Accountant who has run those numbers inside £10m–£15m businesses.
Book a 30-minute initial review →Kettering sits on the A14 between the M1 and the East Coast ports, with slip roads at junctions 7 to 10 feeding Prologis Park, Cransley Park, Symmetry Park and the Latimer Business Park. That geography decided the town's economy. Manufacturing is roughly 14% of the North Northamptonshire workforce against about 8% nationally, and much of it is food and drink: Alpro's plant-based drinks plant in Kettering, which has taken £41m of Danone investment, and the Weetabix Food Company's main site at Burton Latimer, part of a UK operation employing over 1,200 people.
Very few of those are my sort of client. The ones that are sit a tier below: the pallet hauliers, maintenance engineers, packaging firms and fabricators on Telford Way, Pytchley Lodge, Henson Way and Orion Way who invoice the big sites and live or die on contract margin and payment terms.
That is a specific accounting problem, and not the one a generic high-street firm is set up for. When one customer is 40% of your turnover and pays on 75 days, your management accounts have to tell you what that contract earns after fuel, labour and the cost of funding the gap. Most books in this town cannot answer that until March.
These are the errors I expect to find, and the ones the monthly work is built to catch. Each one is tied to a published standard (FRS 102, FRS 105) or an HMRC rule.
Ingredient and packaging stock held at invoice cost with no allowance for short-dated or rejected batches. Rebates and overrider credits recognised when the cheque lands rather than when earned, which flatters one quarter and ruins the next. Processing and refrigeration energy coded to one overhead line, so the per-unit effect of a tariff change is invisible.
Fuel coded gross, with the input VAT and the fuel scale charge handled loosely. Vehicles on hire purchase treated as operating leases, so the balance sheet understates both the asset and the debt. Depreciation policies set years ago and never tested against actual residuals. Pallet network settlements posted net rather than gross in, gross out.
Work in progress estimated once a year by the director instead of built from job cards, which is where overstated profit hides. Labour recovery rates untouched since before the last two pay rounds. Tooling and jigs expensed when they should be capitalised. Scrap and rework buried in materials, so the cost of quality never surfaces.
Kettering East carries consent for around 5,500 homes, which keeps a long tail of groundworkers, roofers and fit-out firms busy. CIS suffered but never reconciled to the HMRC account. Domestic reverse charge applied to the wrong invoices in both directions. Retentions sat in debtors for two years with no provision against them.
Self-billing arrangements with the big sites that nobody reconciles, so your sales ledger and the customer's purchase ledger quietly diverge. Holiday pay accruals missing entirely. Umbrella and intermediary arrangements recorded differently month to month.
Service firms in the smaller suites by the Midland Main Line station: fee income recognised on invoice rather than on delivery, so a heavy billing month reads as a good trading month. No deferred income, and no measure of recoverable hours.
I'm Peter Edwards, a Chartered Management Accountant (ACMA CGMA) with twenty-five years in finance. What matters to a Kettering business is where that time was spent: Head of Finance at a pharmaceutical wholesaler taken from £3m to £10m, where stock valuation and batch traceability were the whole job; at a publishing and media group of around £13m with an ecommerce arm, where carriage, returns and fulfilment cost sat between a decent margin and a poor one; and at a £15m software company. Before that, Responsible Financial Officer and Deputy Town Clerk at a town council, where numbers have to survive public scrutiny.
The questions a manufacturer or a haulier asks are ones I have had to answer with my own name on the accounts, not ones I have read about.
What I do not do, and will refer on: statutory and external audit, specialist tax advice, and personal tax beyond basic Self Assessment. An engineering company that has grown past the audit thresholds needs a registered audit firm, and I will say so rather than keep the work.
The Quick Books Check is free and asks seven things you can answer from memory. No exports, no access to your Xero or Sage. It tells you whether your stock, debtors and VAT position are likely to be reliable.
What you make or move, who your biggest customer is, how long they take to pay, and which number you do not trust. That usually locates the problem.
Catch-up years are £450 + VAT each and dealt with first. Once the history is straight, the monthly cycle starts.
The practice is based in Northamptonshire and works with businesses across the area. There is no Kettering office and no pretence of one: the work is done remotely, with a site visit when there is a reason for one, which with stock counts and job-costing reviews there often is. North Northamptonshire Council is the unitary authority across this whole patch, so the rates, licensing and planning context is the same whether you trade in Kettering, Burton Latimer, Barton Seagrave, Rothwell or Desborough.
Other towns on the corridor: Corby, Wellingborough, Rushden, Northampton, Daventry. See everywhere we work, or the sector pages for manufacturing and construction.
If you cannot answer that today, the books are the reason. Seven questions, answerable from memory, and an honest verdict on whether your figures can be relied on.
No logins, no exports, nothing to download.