The Fizz! Blog

Experienced practice accountant(s) wanted!

Looking for something different from your next job?

We’re a Chartered Accountancy practice based in the centre of Thame, providing a high standard of service to quality clients, both locally and in London. Our client base is growing all the time, and we’re looking for experienced practice accountants to join our friendly team of 17. We have a zero-overtime culture, an excellent staff retention record, offer family-friendly working arrangements, 33 days’ holiday (including Bank Holidays), and pay competitive salaries. We also provide a full CPD programme, and will pay your professional body’s membership fees. We work in a modern open-plan and largely paperless office, and we have a casual dress code.

We’re all generalists here, so you’ll be looking after accounts, corporation tax, VAT, and personal tax for a portfolio of clients across a range of industries, also supporting them with tax planning and general business advice. Clients are on fixed fees and we don’t keep timesheets.

We’re looking for accountants with a strong technical background (whether qualified, or qualified by experience), but who also have great communication skills. The way we present our work to clients is really important to us, so thinking about how best to explain things to different clients and understanding what’s important to them as individuals is a big part of the job.

If you think you’d be a good fit for Fizz, or have any questions about the role, do get in touch (hello @ fizzhq.com)! To apply, just send us a CV along with a covering email letting us know why a job with us would appeal to you. We prefer direct applications over recruitment agencies, and welcome applications from people of all backgrounds.

www.fizzhq.com

Cryptocurrencies and tax problems

Over the last few years, with the rise of Bitcoin and the like, there's been some doubt about the tax consequences of making and losing money by buying and selling cryptocurrencies.  HMRC have published guidance about it now - and essentially it says what most accountants have been saying all along.

For almost all people, cryptocurrency profits and losses will be a Capital Gains Tax thing, not an Income Tax thing.  That might be good or bad depending on your circumstances.  It'd only be an Income Tax thing if you were considered to actually have a trade in buying and selling crypto, and that's going to be vanishingly rare.

Since it's a Capital Gains Tax thing, that means that buying and selling cryptocurrency will generate capital gains and losses as a result of each transaction, in the same way that buying and selling shares does, even if you choose to reinvest the proceeds in another cryptocurrency so haven't seen any real money hit your bank account.

Importantly, you can't just lump together all your cryptocurrencies or accounts/exchanges for the purpose of figuring out what the tax consequences are, it's on a transaction by transaction basis.  So if you buy some Bitcoin, sell it to buy some Etherium, sell that to buy some Bitcoin again, and then sell some of that to buy some Litecoin, you've got three separate transactions to work out the gain or loss on.  You can't aggregate all your Bitcoin trading for the year, or aggregate all the transactions in one account.  If you accumulate a lot of transactions, you might want to look into third party software that can interrogate your accounts and figure it out - some people are trading through a bunch of different accounts, and a sale in one will more than likely need to be matched with a purchase in another for tax purposes.

Also, consider this.  Someone buys £10,000-worth of Bitcoin early in the tax year.  They exchange it for £40,000-worth of Litecoin halfway through the tax year.  Litecoin later crashes and is worth little by the time the person's tax return is done after the end of the year.  That person has a capital gain of £30,000 on which to pay Capital Gains Tax.  The fact that they kept the money in crypto isn't relevant; there's a disposal for £40,000 of something that cost £10,000.  They may now sell the Litecoin for next to nothing, and that will create a capital loss now - but you can't carry that back to set off against the previous year's profit.  The point is, there will be a whole lot of people who don't realise that they've got a very complicated tax issue - because they've not "cashed out", they don't realise that something has happened to create a taxable transaction (or hundreds of them!).  And there will be plenty of people who have made no money at all, but since they made some profits THEN some losses they might be sitting on a tax liability all the same...

www.fizzhq.com

Telephone bill syndrome

As a big - but generally fair - generalisation, the success of most businesses comes down to the largest numbers in their accounts.

As an accountant, for example, the significant numbers are revenue from customers, and staff costs.  Some of the overheads can be fairly significant (rent, software costs, that kind of thing), but an accountancy practice won't fail because of them.  It might well be worth trimming some of them if it's not too time-consuming or disruptive to do so, but it's not going to turn a business around.  If an accounting practice is struggling, it's not because of the overheads.

If you're running a restaurant, say, food and drink costs of course are very significant, along with staff costs, and premises costs might well be crucial too depending on the kind of place you're running.  But that's largely it - again, the other overheads are really unlikely to kill the business.

What isn't going to make or break a business is something like phone bills or stationery (or even accountancy fees!).  But very often an owner of a struggling business will fixate on those kinds of lines in the bottom half of their profit and loss account, talking about how they're too high and need to be cut, rather than getting their head up and looking at the top of the profit and loss account, which is where the problems really are.

It's a displacement activity, of course, which is initially easier than engaging with the real major structural issues.  Engaging with those issues could cause great discomfort, as they might include big mistakes that the business owner has made, and difficult decisions that they need to make in future.  It can be easier to seek refuge by pretending that the problems can be solved by admin and supplier switching.  They probably can't.  You're going to have to be brave and look up.

www.fizzhq.com