CIS, retentions and the reverse charge handled properly, for Wellingborough's trades, contractors, engineering firms and distributors. A Chartered Management Accountant with twenty-five years inside finance functions, working in the Xero or Sage you already have. Fees published, from £95 + VAT a month.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation →Wellingborough had 56,564 residents at the 2021 Census, and the urban extension east of the railway station is consented for around 3,650 homes, put at over £1bn of investment and 3,000-plus jobs. Countryside Partnerships, part of the Vistry Group, leads the 217-home Station Island phase. St Modwen Park on Finedon Road, the A510, sits inside the same scheme with a 183,280 sq ft industrial unit and later phases from 16,000 sq ft.
None of those names is the client. The client is the groundworks firm, the roofer, the mechanical and electrical sub-contractor, the plant hire outfit, the scaffolder and the fit-out joiner working on it and on the Bovis, Miller and Linden sites nearby. Thirty people, a few vans, three main contractors, and a ledger nobody set up for construction.
A contractor withholds 20% of your labour element and pays it to HMRC for you. That is tax on account, not a reduction in what you earned. Netted off sales it understates turnover and distorts gross margin, and at the year end there is an argument about an offset nobody tracked. It should sit in a receivable, agree to each contractor's statement, and offset against PAYE where you pay subbies yourself.
Three per cent, or five, held back on every valuation, half released at practical completion and the rest after a twelve-month defects period. Left in trade debtors, your aged debt report is fiction and the overdraft conversation rests on money that was never arriving this quarter. It needs its own line, by contract, with the release month recorded. Across four plots for a housebuilder it can quietly exceed a month's wage bill.
You apply for £84,000 on the 25th. The quantity surveyor certifies £71,000. If the application went in as a sales invoice you have overstated revenue and VAT by £13,000 and will spend next month raising credit notes. Applications are not tax points. They belong in a stage of their own, converted when certified, with the variance visible so you can see which contractor routinely cuts valuations.
Since March 2021 most construction services between VAT-registered businesses inside the CIS chain are reverse charged: you charge no VAT, the customer accounts for it. It does not apply where your customer is an end user or intermediary supplier, nor to zero-rated supplies, which matters on new-build housing. On a mixed book of main-contractor and direct homeowner work both treatments run at once, so the test is per customer.
This is what kills otherwise profitable trades. Materials are paid for in week one and wages go out weekly. The valuation goes in at month end, is certified part way through the next, and lands 30 to 45 days after that, with a slice retained for a year. Go from four sites to seven and you have doubled the cash you are funding without earning a penny more margin, which is why busy builders fail more often than quiet ones. So the monthly cycle runs on a rolling 13-week cash view driven by certification dates, not stated terms, and credit control costs less than the overdraft. More on the construction and CIS page.
Footwear and engineering built this town — the first Dr Martens boot came out of the R. Griggs works at Wollaston, a few miles south, in 1960 — and the engineering half outlasted the boots. RML Group, founded as Ray Mallock Ltd in 1984, runs its campus here across motorsport, powertrain and battery work, defence and aerospace engineering. Feeding firms like that are the sub-contract machinists, fabricators and toolmakers, alongside the distribution operators on the Park Farm, Denington, Leyland and Finedon Road estates.
Their recurring problem is the one-off jig or test rig built for a single customer's programme with its labour booked to general production: recoverable from that customer, capitalised against the programme, or the price of winning the work — three answers, and the ledger offers none. Work in progress and bills of materials are also the one honest reason to stay on Sage 200 rather than move to Xero; the costing work covers it.
Four tiers. Each one is a fixed monthly amount on Direct Debit, written down and agreed before any work starts. Essentials, £95 + VAT a month, covers bookkeeping and VAT. Essentials + Books, £195 + VAT, adds the year-end accounts and CT600. Managed, £395 + VAT, adds management accounts. Finance Director is £1,250 + VAT. Overdue years are cleared at £450 + VAT each. Nothing is billed by the hour, and statutory audit and specialist tax advice are outside the scope on purpose. See the price list.
A groundworker on a plot at Stanton Cross is not walking into Market Street to see an accountant, and a contractor director is on the 07:12 — 65 miles down the Midland Main Line, into St Pancras in 51 to 55 minutes. The practice sits elsewhere in Northamptonshire and works inside your own Xero or Sage, so you are not paying towards somebody's shopfront. When a conversation genuinely needs to happen face to face, we come to the yard or the site cabin.
Peter Edwards ACMA CGMA does the work: a Chartered Management Accountant and CIMA Member in Practice, twenty-five years in. He was Responsible Financial Officer and Deputy Town Clerk at a town council, then Head of Finance for a software business of about £15m, for a publishing and media group of about £13m with an ecommerce arm attached, and for a pharmaceutical wholesaler that grew from £3m turnover to £10m.
The authority here is North Northamptonshire Council, which is also promoting the A509 Isham bypass, in planning since July 2024 and still waiting on Government funding. Nearby: Rushden, Kettering, Corby, Northampton, Daventry, plus Irthlingborough, Finedon and Wollaston. See everywhere we work.
Seven questions, answered from memory. No logins, no exports, nothing to dig out. You get a straight verdict on whether the figures hold up, before anyone asks you for a thing.
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