Frequently asked questions

In the first few weeks or months of a business, it’s easy to do everything yourself. As a business grows, it becomes harder and harder to keep that up without doing it outside of what should be your nine to five working hours. At first, that’s sustainable, but after a while it takes it toll on your personal life as you need to make personal sacrifices to find the time needed. It’s only natural then that you’ll begin to take on staff to deal with these extra tasks, but this comes with its own unique set of problems.

Perhaps you’ll need bigger premises, new equipment, or for them to undertake training (that can either be costly or take you further away from running your business). Put that alongside the cash required to buy new stock or open up new marketing campaigns and pretty quickly all entrepreneurs learn that the profits they’re making gets soaked up by funding the growth that’s needed. What this creates is a middle period of a business growth cycle where cash is tight and time is even tighter.

An accountant is a professional who prepares, analyses, and files financial statements for a company. While there are many accountants, some specialise in the preparation of financial statements while others specialise in the analysis of them.

At Yellowstone, we do both so that we can advise you on the parts of your business that you could improve. Perhaps your marketing isn’t giving you a good return on investment, or your staff costs are above what they should be for your industry; little insights go a long way to helping you improve your financial position.

A bookkeeper is a professional who enters your invoices into your books (or, in our case, free cloud software) so that your accountant can prepare and file your accounts. They would normally ensure your books are up to date before an accountant looks at them, with the best bookkeepers also performing most of the functions of an accountant.

While engaging an accountant is something most companies will do, for cost-saving reasons lots of businesses will forgo a bookkeeper; however, as a company grows, this can become counterproductive as accountants are expensive to engage to clean up poorly kept books.

When we started out, we approached a few reputable accountants for advice and found that all they wanted to do was to speak to us at year-end. Add to that, we found that if we emailed them, they would take weeks to reply. Having come from a customer service background, we were shocked at how accountancy had become a pile them high industry that didn’t care about the customer. 

As a new business, we felt alone in the world of business. We didn’t know who to go to for advice and found that most government-promoted suppliers were in it for the paycheck from vast but inefficient subsidies. So, we went it alone. We learnt through making mistakes, and we built up a set of core competencies that meant we could help others build their businesses too. 

It’s those core competencies that we offer alongside our accountancy practice today. We don’t want to just be an accountant that prepares a financial statement. We want to be the accountant that you not only call when you have a problem, but the one that shows you the problems and comes to you with the ability to solve them.

As an entrepreneur, you are often going to feel alone when making the big decisions. Sometimes, you might see what you need to do but lack the finances or the know-how to get it done. In that instance, you should be able to call your accountant and say, “this is my problem, can you help?” and your accountant should either be able to point you in the right direction or solve it for you.

But having a relationship isn’t a one-way street; your accountant should also call you every month to check in and tell you about any problems that may be heading your way so you can solve them together, too.

In a fast-paced, hugely interconnected world, opportunities to grow your business come thick and fast. As a business, you should be ready at any moment to recognise and seize those opportunities. This can often be hard in a small to medium-sized business because you lack the skills or staff to be able to do it.

Most entrepreneurs make it work by working long days to get the job done, but this means that they sacrifice their time and freedom to do so. By considering outsourcing, where an external party carries out some or all of the work for you, you can regain that time and freedom, transforming your businesses potential and also saving your weekends to spend with the family.

When there are only a few people in your office, it’s easy to manage all the HR on your own because you have the time. As your business grows, you’ll notice that there are more and more demands put on your time, and one of those is HR. Manging people can become a full-time job pretty quickly once you hit the 15-people mark, but that doesn’t mean you need to employ someone full-time to deal with it.

Provided you can tick the boxes of making sure you have good contracts, a great handbook, and offsite HR support that advises you what to do, you can keep your HR in-house at a fraction of the cost of employing someone.

Because of the varied clients we deal with, our core abilities have grown of the years to make us much more than an accountancy practice. Today we can sort out your business cards, build you a database, work out what VAT to apply from your burger Van, man a phoneline, operate an entire compliance department or just file your accountants.

We can’t actually make a list of what we can do because business transformation and growth is so unpredictable even we don’t know what we’re capable of but it all starts with one key question “Can you help me”. If we can’t we will tell you but we will try our hardest to find someone that can.

There’s a great book about the shoe store Zappos telling their clients they can help them with anything and ended up ordering a pizza for one customer because they had an ethos of not saying no. While we don’t aspire to ordering pizzas instead of delivering shoes, we have yet to find a challenge we can’t match.