Cost per pallet, cost per mile, cost per hour

Six miles from DIRFT, and it shapes every set of books in town

The Daventry International Rail Freight Terminal sits at the M1, A5 and A428 junctions near Crick, roughly six miles north of the town. It opened in 1997 as a rail-connected node off the Northampton loop of the West Coast Main Line, feeding Felixstowe and the Channel Tunnel. Tesco took an 840,000 sq ft grocery distribution centre in DIRFT II in 2011. Royal Mail, Eddie Stobart and Malcolm Rail have all been named operators there. The third phase, approved in 2014 on the former Rugby radio station land, was consented for over seven million square feet of warehousing.

None of that is the client base. The client base is what grows around it: the owner-managed haulier with eleven tractor units subbing into the big boxes, the pallet-network member, the storage-and-handling operator on Drayton Fields, the engineering firm machining for the plant down the road. They carry the accounting complexity of a large company on the overhead budget of a small one.

Where distribution and haulage books usually break

Fuel, AdBlue and agency labour in one undifferentiated lump

Fuel bunkered on a card account, AdBlue, tyres and agency drivers all landing in the same cost code. Fuel is a cost per mile, agency is a cost per shift, tyres a consumable with a mileage life. Blended, they tell you nothing. Split properly, a pence-per-mile figure drops out and you can see which contract is being subsidised by the others.

Fleet finance decided by the bank statement instead of the agreement

Hire purchase on a tractor unit generally brings the asset onto the balance sheet with a matching liability, and only the interest hits profit. Contract hire with maintenance is an operating cost, and the maintenance element is not the rental. On the bank statement all three look like a monthly direct debit. Across a mixed fleet of a dozen vehicles, getting that wrong moves profit and net assets materially, which matters when operator licence financial standing evidence is due or a lender asks for figures.

Depreciation set once and never revisited

Trailers, forklifts and racking written off over a policy life picked years ago that no longer matches how long the kit lasts or what it fetches second hand. A book value nobody believes, and a surprise profit or loss every time a unit goes.

Warehouse rent, service charge and dilapidations as one figure

Multi-let industrial space around Daventry comes with service charge, insurance rent and usually a repairing obligation. Posted as a single rent line, you cannot model a rent review, cannot see the recoverable element, and nothing is provided for dilapidations on a lease with four years left.

Contract revenue in the wrong month

Rate cards invoiced in arrears, retrospective volume rebates, fuel surcharge adjustments, storage billed per pallet per week across a month end. Recognise it when the invoice happens rather than when it was earned and no month is comparable with the last. For a 3PL with a few large customers, that is the difference between spotting a loss-making contract in month two and at the year end.

Daventry's other half: engineering, motorsport and low-carbon units

The town is not only sheds. Cummins runs its largest UK plant here on Royal Oak Way, employing over 1,100 people on high-horsepower engines and power generation for data centres, rail, marine and oil and gas, and has confirmed a $50m investment there. Ford has had a national parts distribution operation on the Royal Oak estate since 1972. J D Wetherspoon's national distribution centre on Drayton Fields, run by DHL, opened in 2004. Fortec Motorsport is based in the town.

Around that sit the sub-contract machinists, fabricators and toolmakers, whose problem is work in progress. A job quoted on an estimated hour count, materials bought in for it, labour booked against it loosely or not at all, and an invoice at the end. Without job costing you know the business made money overall and have no idea which jobs did. That is what the costing work fixes, and it is one of the few places where staying on Sage 200 beats moving to Xero, because bills of materials and stock genuinely need handling.

The iCon centre on Eastern Way, run by the University of Northampton, houses supported units for low-carbon construction and environmental technology firms. Early-stage companies there need the opposite of a finance function: clean books, VAT filed on time, accounts that stand up when a grant funder asks. That is the £95 or £195 tier, not the Finance Director one.

VAT and freight: the bits that get missed

International freight and goods in transit do not behave like a domestic service invoice, and place of supply matters when the customer is overseas. Postponed VAT accounting and the paperwork behind a duty-deferred movement have to agree with the return. We file under Making Tax Digital monthly, and where a treatment is genuinely a specialist question we say so rather than guessing on your behalf.

What the monthly cycle actually produces

• Every transaction coded, bank and fuel card accounts reconciled, VAT return filed
• Fleet, fuel, agency and maintenance separated so a pence-per-mile figure exists
• Management accounts with profit by contract or customer where the data allows, plus plain-English commentary
• A 13-week rolling cash view built around how customers actually pay, not their stated terms
• Year-end accounts and the CT600 for small and micro-entity companies, from the £195 tier
• Catch-up work on overdue years, £450 + VAT per year
• Credit control, because a large customer paying at 75 days is a funding decision you did not make
• Virtual Finance Director where the business has outgrown bookkeeping but cannot justify a salary

Published fees, and what is excluded

Essentials is £95 + VAT a month: bookkeeping and VAT. Essentials + Books is £195 + VAT a month and adds the year-end accounts and the CT600. Managed is £395 + VAT a month with monthly management accounts and commentary. Finance Director is £1,250 + VAT a month. Fixed, by Direct Debit, agreed in writing before anything starts. No hourly rates and no timesheets.

Excluded deliberately: statutory and external audit, specialist tax advice, and personal tax beyond basic Self Assessment. See the full price list or work out what your current arrangement costs you.

No Daventry office, because the M1 matters more than a high street

Daventry has about 28,000 residents and no passenger railway station, making it one of the largest towns in England without one. Nobody walks to see their accountant here. We are based elsewhere in Northamptonshire and work on your existing software, which keeps a high street lease out of the fee. Where meeting properly is the right thing, we come to the yard or the unit.

Who does the work

Peter Edwards ACMA CGMA, personally: a Chartered Management Accountant and CIMA Member in Practice with 25 years in finance. Head of Finance at a pharmaceutical wholesaler through growth from £3m to £10m, at a £13m publishing and media group with an ecommerce arm, and at a £15m software company, plus a spell as Responsible Financial Officer and Deputy Town Clerk at a town council. Stock, fleet and contract margin are not theory. Not a junior, not offshore.

Nearby: Northampton, Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough, plus Long Buckby, Braunston, Crick and the villages along the A361 and A425. See everywhere we work.