Why is delegating your self-assessment more efficient than doing it yourself?
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“How do I delegate my self-assessment? Won’t I need to gather all my paperwork together? I might as well just do the whole job myself?”
There are a few reasons why outsourcing your self-assessment is more efficient than doing it yourself.
Firstly, anxiety and overwhelm around hitting the deadline.
It’s already November 2021. There are only two months left until the deadline, and they still haven’t done it.
But there’s a good reason they don’t want to.
Secondly, it’s boring.
Who likes to download all their statements and gather receipts?
Who even knows where the receipts are?
We put it off day after day, week after week and month after month. Until suddenly it’s January, and we have only days to get it all together and submit it.
It’s absolutely something that can be done by someone else.
That’s exactly the point of back-office and the value of the service we offer because it’s not income-generating activity.
The way that we do things helps a lot with the feelings of overwhelming business owners experience.
For example, we’ve had self-assessment clients that don’t know how to download their bank statements.
We teach them the best and easiest way to do that. And crucially we teach them why they need to do it that way.
The ‘why’ is the secret sauce.
Explaining how and why we do things the way we do is crucial to helping our clients feel more organised and in control.
The boredom of collating receipts and invoices also triggers our self-assessment clients.
Often the transactions are clear on the bank statement, but they don’t know where the invoices or receipts are.
That’s when we can step in.
We give our clients a list of all the receipts they need to provide, and ring suppliers to ask them for copies.
We alleviate a lot of the overwhelm simply by leading our clients through the process.
One client in the creative arts sector told us that she hadn’t been able to create for 6 to 7 weeks because of the anxiety she had about her self-assessment.
For example, just by asking our client for some identity details, and explaining how to download her bank statement, she responded with:
“Dare I say it, but this is the first time I’ve been excited …yes, excited about doing accounts. It’s your energy, Jackie. You’re amazing!”
It’s all about the way we onboard all our self-assessment clients that makes the most difference. We hold their hand in an empowering and confident way that makes them feel supported.
Nothing is too much trouble for us. We recently took on a self-assessment client who is pen and paper led. No spreadsheets. No software. No problem for us.
We onboarded her using our process and managed the transition from pen and paper to digital with her in a way that made her feel like we’d put our arm around her, rather than dragging her kicking and screaming.
We’ve seen it and sorted it all before.
And because we did such a good job looking after her self-assessment she decided to give us all of her bookkeeping too, plus we produced a monthly income and expenditure report and quarterly profit and loss report for her. We transferred her bookkeeping to accountancy software because it saves time and money. And because we’re a Xero certified partner our clients pay the same through us as directly to Xero.
The fact is we love admin, and we are good at sorting it out.
It didn’t take us long because we have templates that we use which work very well. When we completed it all and asked her if she wanted to continue doing her bookkeeping, she said she never wanted to see her books again! She explained that she trusted us and our process because we’d made everything so super easy and efficient for her, saving her so much time and effort. Subsequently, we submitted her self-assessment early this year. Year-end was 31 March 2021, and we submitted it in May 2021. This is a fast turn around.
Imagine what that feels like?
We have a sole trader client that brought in pen and paper books and a box of receipts to me. We immediately transferred him to accounting software before proceeding to submit his self-assessment.
Our sole trader clients trust us to keep them safe and we do that by using accountancy software to future-proof them and their business.
