Red Sofa Interviews

Jake Stubbs on The Red Sofa

Watch the full interview here

Interviewer: Today on The Red Sofa, we Welcomed Jake Stubbs from Essendon Accounts and Tax.

Jake: Jake, welcome to The Red Sofa. Tell us a little about yourself, your role within Essendon and the types of clients that you manage.

Thank you. I’ve been at Essendon for seven years. My role is as an Accountant and Business Development Executive. So we help many clients look at their monthly figures, annual accounts, and all the combined stuff they might need.

We also help do some forecastings and look forward to the future about what a local business might need to do to sustain the current climate and things in the future.

Interviewer: Typically, why would a client choose a need to come to you?

Jake: If we start with the need, many clients need to know how they will survive in the future, especially in the current climate.

Historically we’ve had clients that want to comply and submit the accounts by the deadline to HMRC and not worry too much. They’ll go off their bank balance about how the business is doing.

But in today’s world with the pandemic and other events that have  happened, people need to now look at the current figures, look at the future and how the business is going to sustain future increases in, for example, fuel prices, salary and all the different things that are affecting the market at the moment.

I think people choose us because we try to offer a more business advisory service, more of a relationship, and we don’t want to bill clients for every conversation and email. We want to provide ad hoc and advisory work and help them grow their business, which in turn helps us and sort of helps our business. So it’s more of a relationship that we try to give our clients than just a service we’re going to charge for.

Interviewer: You mentioned the cost of living crisis there are you able to give a scenario based on a typical client on how what you offer at Essendon can help clients forecast their business, manage their cash flow and make them more stable in these uncertain times?

Jake: A prime example of a client is that they might have a price point that they can’t push their sale margins up by. Therefore, in the past, they’ve had to look at getting the cheapest cost of goods or looking at their staff. Whether they’re overstaffed, understaffed or got the right type staff for their business.

Nowadays, with the increase in fuel, staff inflation costs, and bank interests going up, people that have got loans in their business, they have to start looking about what the next three, six, nine and twelve months look like.

So we tried to sort of look at the business as a whole rather than just taking the numbers, so the main focus is the numbers and what that tells us. Then we’ll delve into the numbers with the client about operationally how the business will perform the changes that we think or that we’ve seen from other clients and try and help clients think more into the future.

So we’ll make cash flow projections forecasting into the future and make those decisions with them in the partnership we want to provide our clients.

Interviewer: There are plenty of accounts offered to enable businesses to look at real-time information. What do you do that gives added value to the data within these platforms? Be that Sage, Xero, QuickBooks, or Xledger, for example.

Jake: These softwares are great. Xero is very good. They can log in from anywhere in the world and look at the information.

What we then do is log in and look at that and translate that to the client and give them the information in a way that they’re going to understand the client’s very good at what they do. And then they allow us to then delve into it more and work on this partnership to understand the figures better together for that individual client and what they need at that point.

Interviewer: Can you offer any simple tips to help businesses manage and understand their accounts better?

There are probably two top tips I have for businesses at the moment.

Jake: One would be your tax liabilities and having a provision and thinking forward to save for those. So what we try to do is part of our management accounts, bookkeeping and VAT returns on a quarterly monthly basis for clients is put in a tax revision, look at how much they’re going to have and when they’ve got to pay that to the client or can save that for now. And that also comes back to VAT and other taxes they’ve got to pay.

Another thing clients have to think about is the assets that they’re buying. Post-Pandemic, the government has now introduced the super deduction so clients can get a 130% capital allowance on part machinery. So we’re trying to advise clients to make those purchases in the time period that they’ve got the allowance so that they can get that extra deduction, therefore have a lower tax and reinvest in their business for the future. So we try and provide these top tips to our clients.

Interviewer:Jake, that’s great. Thank you for your time today.

Jake: My pleasure. Thank you.

Interviewer: So if you want to truly understand the performance of your business and have reliable data to help steer your business in the right direction, get in touch with Jake at Essendon Accounts and Tax.

Watch the full interview here