When BAS Director and Accountant, Brett Smith was asked by a local publication to write about a typical day for him, we didn’t expect dishwashers or Star Wars but we are pleased that accounts and saving clients’ tax made it into his day…
I can’t imagine the anticipation and excitement you must be feeling waiting for me to explain the day in the life of an accountant… although hopefully, it’s not as dull as you might have first thought.
The working day usually starts (as with most people) by turning up to work, grabbing a drink (I’ve been told I don’t drink enough by the team. So, now I am drinking 2L a day I can honestly say… I don’t notice any difference) and emptying the dishwasher when it’s my turn – I can tell I’ve captured you’re attention.
Then the real work starts.
As an accountant I am a bit of a creature of habit. I’ll go through our own business accounts on Xero first and ensure that’s up to date. Then through our internal work planning and customer relationship management system to see what’s up next, what’s happened overnight or come in late yesterday, and any automations that need my attention. That only takes a few minutes a piece unless we have bank holidays or weekends and it takes a little longer. Then it’s into the e-mails.
By the time I’ve got through them we’ll have no doubt had an office catch-up about our evenings or weekends… whilst there’s no football on at the moment, we do have a wide-variety of teams supported and ages of those supporters, so more often than not, there is a little bit of football involved, especially as we build up to the Euros. Probably exactly as you expected so far, but then as an accountant my day goes a bit all over the place.
Some days I’m able to sit down and crack on with some accounts and tax returns, and inform people that they need to pay money to HMRC – what a joy! And actually for me it can be – whilst informing people about tax bills isn’t fun, getting through a load of “work” and reducing my task list is super satisfying, but most days it’s speaking to clients and team members, helping them with taxation and accounts queries.
These can range from whether something is tax-deductible or not to the benefits of re-structuring their existing company, but mostly they fall somewhere in between. Fortunately, we have an amazing team who handle a lot of the queries from their accounts themselves, but myself and Dawn are always here to help.
When it comes to lunch…
I have the same lunch most days (told you I’m a creature of habit!). I tend to have my lunch in the downstairs area of our office, next to my Star Wars Lego that my wife bought me and then banned from our house.
A general working week can have it’s swings and roundabouts. If I think about a recent week in particular it started by informing 2 separate clients that they had extra tax to pay that they weren’t expecting, not through any fault of ours I might add, but something I had to inform them of as a result of historical on-going situations within their business.
Then later that same week, I managed to save a client nearly £2,500 on their tax bill (nearly a 15% reduction) just by some basic tax planning. Fortunately for my sanity the bad came before the good, so that week ended on a high, but it can be the other way round.
If you’d like to more about how Brett and the BAS Team could support you, your business and your tax affairs then get in touch here!
