A finance function that keeps pace with a funded company — management accounts your board trusts, runway you can defend, and books that survive the next diligence process.
Before the round, the books existed for HMRC. After it, they exist for a board — people who will read your numbers against the plan you raised on, every month, and ask about the gap.
Meanwhile the obligations multiply: SEIS/EIS conditions to keep intact, an option scheme to value and report, an R&D claim under rules that tightened, revenue to recognise properly rather than when cash arrives, and a diligence process that will eventually read everything you filed. Founders usually discover the shortfall three weeks before a board meeting, or three weeks into a term sheet.
Closed by the tenth working day, reconciled, and written up — so the board meeting is about decisions rather than about whether the numbers are right.
Illustrative pack structure. Yours is built to the format your lead investor already reads.
Monthly P&L, balance sheet and cashflow with a written commentary, plus the metrics your investors track — burn, runway, ARR, gross margin, CAC and payback — defined once and reported consistently.
A model you can actually run hiring plans through, with the downside case built before you need it. Updated monthly against actuals, so runway is a fact rather than a hope.
Claims prepared under the merged scheme with the contemporaneous project records and cost apportionment HMRC now expects. We'd rather file a defensible claim than a flattering one.
Advance assurance support, compliance statements, and ongoing monitoring of the conditions that quietly invalidate relief. See our plain-English guide.
Scheme set-up, HMRC valuation agreement, grant notifications inside the deadline, and the annual return — plus a cap table that reflects reality including the option pool.
SaaS subscriptions, annual prepayments, usage billing and multi-currency contracts recognised properly, so ARR and deferred revenue mean what an investor thinks they mean.
PAYE and pensions for a growing team, contractor arrangements reviewed for status risk, and fully-loaded cost per head — the number that actually drives your burn.
Books, filings, contracts and tax positions kept in a state where the data room is a folder you share, not a project you start.
Subsidiary set-up, intercompany arrangements and consolidation once there's a second entity — with local specialists via our partner network in the US, Germany, France and the Netherlands.
The finance function should be one step ahead of the raise, not one behind it.
Clean incorporation, share classes that won't need unpicking, SEIS advance assurance, Xero from day one and an expense discipline that makes the first R&D claim possible.
Monthly close, a board pack, an EMI scheme before the first key hires negotiate, and a model that shows what the round buys you in months.
Audit-ready records, revenue recognition that holds up, cohort and unit economics, and diligence answered from documents that already exist.
When you hire a VP Finance, they inherit a functioning system rather than an archaeology project. We step back into technical support, or out entirely.
We work inside Xero as a Xero Gold Partner, in your Slack, and to your board calendar.
You get named people rather than a ticket queue: someone doing the bookkeeping weekly, someone qualified reviewing the close, and a fractional CFO in the room for the board meeting and the raise if you want one. Fixed monthly fee, scoped to your stage, with no surprise invoices for a question.
And when it comes to the raise itself, we prepare the numbers, answer the diligence questions, and stay out of the negotiating — that's your job and your lawyers'.
They provide a first class service and are extremely knowledgeable. I have used other bookkeepers in the past and didn't get anywhere near the help and support I get from Pete and his team.— Steve Bees, Google review · ★★★★★
Often the bookkeeping is fine and the interpretation is missing. We can sit above an existing bookkeeper, or take the whole thing — we'll say which is cheaper for you after looking at the file.
Yes, and we frequently do. First job is a diagnostic of where the records actually stand, then a rebuild of whatever diligence will touch, in priority order.
We'll tell you honestly what's claimable and what isn't. The current regime penalises optimistic claims, and a challenged claim during a raise costs more than the relief was worth.
That's the intended endpoint. We document everything as we go so the handover is a week, not a quarter, and we stay available for the technical work if it helps.