For accountancy practices
Extend your team while keeping your clients and your margin.
B4ES gives UK practices a white-label delivery bench across bookkeeping, accounts, tax, payroll, audit support and practice administration. You keep the engagement, the brand, the review and the relationship. We supply the hours.
- Fully white-labelled
- Second-person review
- Non-solicitation contracted
- No minimum commitment
Why firms move now
The capacity problem is not going to resolve itself
UK practices are absorbing a talent shortage, a quadrupling of MTD contact cycles, a higher cost of employment and a rolling programme of Companies House reform all at once, mostly with the same headcount they had three years ago.
Recover partner and senior time
Every hour a qualified senior spends on transaction processing is an hour priced at a fraction of its opportunity cost. Moving that work out saves some cost, but the bigger gain is putting your most expensive people on your highest-margin work.
Take on clients you currently decline
A large majority of UK practices report turning away work because they cannot resource it. With delivery capacity that scales with demand, you can say yes to that work without a hiring commitment you would regret in a quieter year.
Stop losing staff to the grind
What wears junior accountants down is the repetitive volume that fills their week. Taking it out is one of the more reliable ways for a practice to keep them, and it costs less than a counter-offer.
Make advisory revenue actually happen
Firms have talked about moving up the value chain for a decade, and most have the ambition and the capability. What stops them is that compliance work fills every available hour first. Free those hours and there is room for the advisory conversations.
White label
Your clients never encounter us
For us, white-labelling means a set of operational controls. These are the ones we run.
- Work performed inside your practice software under named logins you create, permission and revoke
- All client-facing output (accounts, packs, payslips and letters) carries your branding, never ours
- Where you want client contact handled, it happens from your email domain in your house style
- Our team members are introduced by name to your staff, not rotated anonymously between jobs
- Contractual non-solicitation: we do not approach, market to or accept engagements from your clients
- You decide whether to name us to clients; we follow that decision without exception
Your regulatory position, stated plainly
Under UK GDPR your practice is the data controller and B4ES is a processor. That relationship must be governed by a written Article 28 agreement, reflected in your engagement letters and privacy notice, and supported by a transfer risk assessment. We provide the documentation to make that straightforward, but the obligation stays yours. Avoid any provider that suggests otherwise.
Audit work carries a harder line
Where we support audit engagements we act solely as a resource under the direction, supervision and review of your Responsible Individual. We perform documented procedures. We do not assess materiality, evaluate misstatements, conclude on going concern or contribute to the opinion. Anything requiring professional judgement is escalated to your team, never resolved by ours.
Service lines
Ten delivery services for UK practices
Start with one. Most firms begin with a single service line and a single cycle, then widen once the working relationship has proved itself.
Bookkeeping
Daily, weekly or monthly bookkeeping, kept reconciled and ready for review, so year-end starts from clean data.
Read moreYear-End Accounts
Statutory accounts prepared to FRS 102 or FRS 105, with full working papers, ready for your partner review and signature.
Read moreManagement Accounts
Monthly or quarterly management packs on a fixed timetable, ready for the advisory conversations that earn fees.
Read moreVAT & MTD
VAT returns prepared and reconciled to the ledger, plus the quarterly MTD for Income Tax cycle that has quadrupled client contact.
Read morePersonal Tax
Self assessment returns prepared, reconciled and checked, with capacity for the January volume and no seasonal hiring cycle.
Read moreCorporation Tax
CT600 returns and computations prepared alongside the accounts, with the available reliefs identified and checked.
Read morePayroll
RTI-compliant payroll processing, auto-enrolment, CIS and year-end forms, run to a calendar that never slips.
Read moreAudit Support
Fieldwork, testing and file preparation performed under your methodology. The opinion, judgement and sign-off stay entirely with you.
Read moreCompany Secretarial
Confirmation statements, share transactions and statutory registers kept current through the deepest Companies House reform in decades.
Read morePractice Support
The unbilled work that takes up your fee earners' time: records chasing, onboarding, workflow hygiene and deadline tracking.
Read moreFractional CFO
Senior financial input on a fractional basis: planning, modelling, funding preparation and board-level challenge.
Read moreRisk & Advisory
Specialist teams most firms cannot staff: governance and risk, transaction and valuation, IT and cyber risk, ESG reporting and actuarial support.
Read moreHR & Training
Governance for your workforce: employment policy, people risk and structured technical training.
Read moreGetting started
What the first ninety days look like
We pace it deliberately. Firms that dump three hundred jobs into a new provider in week one create the failure they later blame on outsourcing.
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1
Weeks 1 to 2: Scope and diligence
Scoping call, written proposal, and your review of our documentation.
- Service mix, volumes, peak periods and software confirmed
- Draft data processing agreement issued for your legal review
- Security documentation and transfer risk assessment support provided
- Written proposal with scope, model, turnaround and pricing
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2
Weeks 3 to 5: Paid pilot
A real batch of real work, priced standalone, with no obligation to continue.
- Typically ten to twenty jobs, or one full payroll or VAT cycle
- Your file standards and templates applied from the first job
- Structured feedback session on output quality and file presentation
- Process notes written up for every client in the batch
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3
Weeks 6 to 9: Transition
Access, documentation, named team and escalation path established properly.
- Named user accounts created by you, with role-based permissions
- Process manual documented per client and signed off by your team
- Named delivery team introduced, with a single point of escalation
- Communication cadence and reporting format agreed
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4
Weeks 10 to 13: Ramp and review
Volume increases against a plan, then a formal review before steady state.
- Volume stepped up in agreed increments rather than all at once
- Weekly exception reporting on anything at risk of slipping
- Formal service review covering quality, turnaround and commercials
- Forward capacity plan agreed ahead of your next peak period
Questions
What practice partners ask us
We tried outsourcing before and it did not work. Why would this be different?
Most failed outsourcing engagements fail on file quality and review burden rather than technical accuracy. The accounts were right but the file could not be reviewed, so the partner rebuilt the job to understand it. We address that with a second-person review and a completion checklist that travels with every file, and we would rather you tested that on a paid pilot than took our word for it.
How do you handle our peak season?
By planning it in advance. We agree expected volumes and daily throughput ahead of the December and March peaks and reserve named resource against them. Capacity booked in September costs less and performs better than capacity scrambled for in January. That is true of every provider, though few will tell you before you have signed.
What is the minimum commitment?
There is not one for the pilot, and we do not require a long tie-in afterwards. We would rather retain firms on performance than on a notice period. Ad-hoc and per-job models exist so you can use us for overflow without restructuring your practice around us.
Can you work with our existing outsourcing provider in place?
Yes. Several firms deliberately run a second provider, for resilience, for a specific service line or as a benchmark. We are comfortable being the second provider and will not make it awkward.
Who do we actually speak to day to day?
A named engagement lead on our side, plus the named team members working your files. There is no rotating pool and no ticketing system. If your point of contact changes we tell you in advance and handle the handover ourselves.
Next step
Test us on a real batch before you commit to anything.
Bring ten jobs, one payroll cycle or one VAT quarter. Priced as a standalone piece of work, delivered to your file standards, with a structured feedback session at the end. If it is not right, you have lost a job batch rather than a year.
What to expect
- No obligation and no minimum commitment to talk
- A written proposal within five working days
- A paid pilot before any long-term arrangement