Helping you prosper
For many years, the accountant-client relationship centred on an annual meeting, a review of year-end figures and a checklist of compliance tasks to complete. Today, while compliance remains essential, the role of the modern accountant has evolved much further than annual reporting deadlines.
Your adviser should help you navigate shifting regulatory requirements, rising costs, rapid digital transformation and ambitious growth plans. To achieve true prosperity, whatever that means for your business, a once-a-year conversation simply isn’t enough.
Understanding the bigger picture
The right adviser will take time to get to know you and your business’ journey so far. They should know where you have come from, how you have evolved and where you want to go next. Developing this knowledge and understanding from the outset forms the basis for guidance and advice that is proactive and tailored to you specifically.
Your adviser should act as a sounding board for ideas and challenges, helping you make the right decisions with confidence.
Adding strategic value
A good adviser will always be readily available to support your business in several ways, including:
- Compliance: Ensuring timely and accurate reporting, VAT compliance, bookkeeping and management accounts. Providing regular financial insights to scaling businesses to enable you to make informed management decisions in real time, not just at the year end.
- Forecasting and planning: Anticipating future performance, preparing for challenges and seizing opportunities with forecasting. They will be on hand to support businesses to set and monitor budgets and forecasts, while working with your senior team to drive and monitor performance.
- Cloud and software support: Reviewing your internal finance functions to ensure efficiency and compliance, implementing cloud-based solutions and ensuring your team has the relevant training to use them correctly and effectively.
- Financing options: Guiding you through funding options, from traditional loans, invoice financing and alternative finance to ensure you find the right fit for your business.
- Bookkeeping support: Stepping in when internal resources are stretched to keep your finance function running smoothly.
- Credit control: Strengthening your cash flow through effective credit control solutions.
- Transaction support: Supporting brokers with transactions where expertise or resource internally is limited to support a financial due diligence process.
UHY’s approach to helping clients prosper
At UHY, our purpose, helping you prosper, means understanding your business at every stage. It is so much more than a slogan, it is a principle that forms the core of everything we do for our clients, teams and communities. For us, prosperity comes from taking the time to build strong relationships, so we can offer advice that’s not only timely but also tailored to your ambitions.
We always aim to be more than accountants to our clients. By acting as an extension of your team, we can respond quickly when challenges arise, identify opportunities before they pass and help you adapt with confidence.
Upcoming compliance changes to be aware of
One of the most important ways the right adviser adds value is by helping you prepare for what is coming, not just react to it.
With that in mind, here are some of the major compliance changes on the horizon that could impact your business:
Change in thresholds (April 2025)
More companies will now qualify as small and be exempt from audits, with the new limits set at £15 million turnover, 50 employees and £7.5 million in assets.
Companies House identity verification (November 2025)
From 18 November 2025, it will be a legal requirement for company directors, LLP members and individuals with significant control (PSC’s) to verify their identity with Companies House. This change introduced under Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, aims to reduce fraud and to improve transparency.
FRS 102 Lease Accounting (January 2026)
The UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC) is aligning standards more closely with IFRS 16. Lessees will now need to capitalise operating leases on the balance sheet, recognising a right-of-use (ROU) asset. The current lease expenses will be presented as depreciation and interest and therefore affecting EBITDA (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation). With exemptions available for short-term leases and low-value leases. This will impact almost all lessees, increasing assets and liabilities in the balance sheet and potentially breaching the audit thresholds as a result. Those with a higher value of leases will be impacted the most.
Making Tax Digital for Income Tax (April 2026)
HMRC are changing the way some sole traders and landlords need to report their income and expenses. If your total income from self-employment and property is over £50,000 (before deducting expenses or taxes) in your 2024-25 tax return, you'll need to use Making Tax Digital for Income Tax from 6 April 2026 (unless you are exempt). This means you will need to get software that works with Making Tax Digital for Income Tax, which can help you to create, store and correct your digital records of income and expenses, send your quarterly updates (summaries of your digital records) and submit your tax return. Refer back to the earlier article for more information.
Small company filing exemptions paused (April 2027)
Originally set for April 2027 under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, these changes would have removed exemptions for small companies to file abridged accounts and instead would have to file a copy of the balance sheet, directors report and profit and loss statement. However, these changes have been paused by the new Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds due to concerns from small firms about the administrative burden. While the aim was greater transparency, it remains unclear whether these reforms will be scrapped completely or simply delayed.
We are here to help
Finding the right adviser will not only keep you compliant but will also help you anticipate changes, proactively manage challenges and make the most of any opportunities available. They should combine technical expertise with a genuine understanding and care of your business, providing the clarity and confidence you need to move forward.
If you are unsure about how any upcoming changes may affect you and your business, now is the time to start the conversation. It’s essential to prepare and adapt to keep your business progressing in the right direction. Get in touch with your usual UHY adviser, or contact us directly, to discuss how we can help you prosper today and in the future.
Download Prosper issue ten
This article is taken from our latest issue of Prosper magazine, written by our team of advisers aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises. Read and download Prosper issue ten.
