For growing UK businesses

A finance function that fits where you are now.

Most growing businesses reach a stage where a part-time bookkeeper is not enough and a three-person finance team is too much. B4ES covers that gap as a service: transaction processing, month-end close, management reporting and CFO-level input, sized to your business rather than to a standard package.

No fixed headcount
Month-end to a published timetable
Segregation of duties built in
Clean exit if you in-source

Book a discovery call Outsourced finance function

The problem

You have outgrown bookkeeping and cannot yet justify a finance team

It is one of the most common and least discussed stages of growth. The numbers arrive late, nobody owns the forecast, and the founder is still approving purchase invoices at eleven at night.

A financial controller, a management accountant and a purchase ledger clerk is a substantial fixed commitment before employer National Insurance, pension contributions, software, holiday cover and recruitment fees. Employer NI at 15% with a £5,000 secondary threshold has made that arithmetic materially worse.

Meanwhile the need is real and growing: lenders want forecasts, investors want board packs and suppliers want paying on terms. The person holding it all together is either the founder or a single bookkeeper whose departure would be a crisis.

Management information that arrives weeks after it would have been useful
No reliable cash forecast beyond what is currently in the bank
Key-person risk concentrated in one part-time individual
Controls that were fine at ten staff and are not fine at fifty
A year-end that turns into a three-month archaeological exercise

What you get instead

Daily and weekly processing Purchase ledger, sales ledger, bank reconciliation and expenses handled on a rhythm that matches your business.
Month-end on a fixed date A published close timetable. The pack arrives on the same working day every month.
Reporting with commentary Management accounts, KPIs, cash forecasting and variance analysis, written for a reader who is not an accountant.
CFO-level input on demand Modelling, funding preparation, pricing analysis and board attendance when a decision warrants it.
Controls and documentation Segregation of duties, a documented process manual and audit-ready records, all of which remain yours.

Services

What we deliver for businesses

Take the full function or a defined part of it. Most businesses start with the transactional layer and month-end close, then add reporting and CFO input as decisions get bigger.

Bookkeeping

Daily, weekly or monthly bookkeeping, kept reconciled and ready for review, so year-end starts from clean data.

Management Accounts

Monthly or quarterly management packs on a fixed timetable, ready for the advisory conversations that earn fees.

VAT & MTD

VAT returns prepared and reconciled to the ledger, plus the quarterly MTD for Income Tax cycle that has quadrupled client contact.

Payroll

RTI-compliant payroll processing, auto-enrolment, CIS and year-end forms, run to a calendar that never slips.

Company Secretarial

Confirmation statements, share transactions and statutory registers kept current through the deepest Companies House reform in decades.

Outsourced Finance Function

A complete finance department for a growing UK business, from transaction processing to board reporting, without you having to build the team.

Fractional CFO

Senior financial input on a fractional basis: planning, modelling, funding preparation and board-level challenge.

Risk & Advisory

Specialist teams most firms cannot staff: governance and risk, transaction and valuation, IT and cyber risk, ESG reporting and actuarial support.

HR & Training

Governance for your workforce: employment policy, people risk and structured technical training.

We work alongside your accountant, not instead of them

Keep your accountant. They hold the statutory accounts, the tax advice and the independent professional relationship, and it is right that an independent party does. We run the finance function underneath and prepare their year-end pack, which normally makes their work faster and their fee smaller. If your accountant would rather deliver this themselves, we are equally happy to sit behind them instead.

Designed so you can leave

The process manual, the controls documentation and the data all stay yours throughout. If you grow into wanting an in-house team, we help you recruit into a documented function and hand over cleanly. If you cannot exit a service, the provider holds leverage over you, and sooner or later it gets used.

Questions

What business owners ask

What size of business does this suit?

Typically businesses between roughly £1m and £20m of turnover, or anyone with enough transaction volume and reporting need that a single bookkeeper is no longer sufficient. Below that a good bookkeeper and a good accountant is usually the right answer, and we will say so.

Where is the work actually done?

Delivery is provided from our partner's operation in Pakistan, established in 2014, working to UK hours and UK standards. Your engagement, your contract and your point of contact are with B4ES in the UK. We state this openly because you are entitled to know where your data is processed.

Do you have access to our bank accounts?

No. We prepare payment runs and BACS files for your approval, but payment authority stays with you. This is a deliberate control boundary and we will not vary it, even if asked.

How quickly can you start?

For a straightforward business with reasonable records, typically two to four weeks from agreement. That allows time for access setup, process documentation and a proper handover from whoever does the work now. Rushing that stage is where transitions go wrong.

What if our records are a mess?

Then we say so, scope the clean-up as a separate piece of work, and price it separately. What we will not do is absorb an unknown quantity of remediation into a monthly fee and then renegotiate three months in.

Next step

Start with a conversation about where the pressure is.

Thirty minutes on how your finance function runs today, what breaks first when you grow, and what a sensible next step looks like. If the answer is a better bookkeeper rather than us, we will tell you.

Book a discovery call See the full service

What to expect

No obligation and no minimum commitment to talk
A written proposal within five working days
A defined trial period before any ongoing arrangement

Prefer email? info@b4es.co.uk