Monthly management accounts you can act on, the cost and margin of every service line, and someone qualified to think the pricing decisions through with. The bookkeeping and VAT too, if you would rather hand over the lot.
Book a 30-minute conversation →Most independent practices price the way the profession always has: by reference to what the practice down the road charges, adjusted by feel. That worked while prices sat behind the consulting room door. It stops working the moment they are published, compared, and sitting next to a corporate group's list.
The exposure is not the publishing. It is discovering, in public, which services you have been running at a loss. Consultations priced below the cost of the slot plus the vet plus the nurse plus premises. Diagnostics priced against a machine bought four years ago at a utilisation rate nobody has calculated. Prescription fees, historically a quiet margin cushion, now capped.
None of that appears in a set of year-end accounts. Year-end accounts tell you whether you made a profit. They do not tell you where it came from, and they arrive months after the year they describe.
That is the difference between an accountant and a finance director, and it is the work I do. Practices across Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and the surrounding counties are served in person where it helps, and remotely where it does not.
Nothing here is regulatory advice. The CMA Order is not yet in force and the compliance timetable varies by practice size; the RCVS and your professional bodies remain the authority on what you must do and when. My part is making sure the numbers underneath your decisions are right.
Not a year-end service with monthly bookkeeping attached. A monthly cycle that ends in decisions, with the compliance falling out of the same records.
Profit and loss, balance sheet and commentary written to be read rather than filed. What moved, why, and what it means for the months ahead.
Consultations, diagnostics, surgery, dispensing. What each one earns after the vet, the nurse, the room and the equipment — the analysis your price list depends on.
Thirteen weeks ahead, updated monthly. Insurer settlements and health-plan income arrive on different rhythms from the work that earned them.
Before you buy the machine, what utilisation does it need to pay for itself. After you have bought it, whether it is earning its keep.
Statutory accounts and the CT600 for small and micro-entity practices, prepared from records kept all year. No scramble, no handover.
If you would rather hand over the whole finance function, we take the ledger too. VAT reviewed before every return, not after HMRC asks.
I'm Peter Edwards. Before setting up my own practice I spent twenty-five years as Head of Finance in industry — a £15m software business through a restructuring, a £13m publisher where I led an intellectual property acquisition including full due diligence, and a pharmaceutical wholesaler running around a thousand product lines that grew from £3m to £10m.
Working out what a service costs to deliver, and what to do about it, is the core of a management accountant's training. It is a different discipline from year-end compliance, and it is the one this sector now needs.
You deal with me. No junior doing the work and a partner signing it, because there is no junior and no partner. Personal Self Assessment and specialist tax planning go to a firm that does that properly, and I will tell you plainly where that line falls.
Thirty minutes, free. What the practice is trying to do, what the numbers currently tell you, and what they do not.
Scope and a fixed monthly fee, agreed before anything starts. If a smaller piece of work would serve you better, I will say so.
Management accounts, commentary and a call. From the first complete month, and you can stop on a month's notice.
Thirty minutes, no charge and no obligation. If your figures already tell you what a consultation costs to deliver, I will say so and you will have lost half an hour.
Book a 30-minute conversation → Or run the free Books Check first — seven questions, no logins