Beagle HR - Advice - Compliance - Processes
Accountant
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IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ BEFORE APPLYING. There are screening questions at the end of this advert and we do read the answers.
Accountant
West Horsley, Surrey (KT24 6JT)
Full time, permanent, office based
£38,000 to £48,000 per year, depending on experience, plus company pension
Most accountancy jobs put you in a lane. You do VAT. Or you sit in a year end team and never see what happens next. Three years later you are very good at one thing and you still have no real idea how the rest of it fits together.
This role is the opposite of that. You will work across the whole compliance cycle, from a first set of messy records through to a finished set of accounts and the tax that follows, on a client base that runs across a wide range of industries and sizes.
And it does not stop at the work. Our client is hiring for this role now because they need someone who will grow into leading the accountants at this office. You come in doing the work, you take on your own portfolio, and then you take on the team. That is why the experience we are asking for and the money on offer are both higher than the last time this role was advertised.
Recruitment for this role is being handled by Beagle HR Ltd on behalf of our client, an established independent accountancy practice in Surrey.
Our client is an independent practice with two offices, in West Horsley and Shepperton, and a team of around twenty, working with owner managed businesses across a broad range of sectors. They run on a modern cloud accounting stack. In a market full of cheap online accounting, they win work by being human, responsive and properly invested in how their clients are doing.
This advert is for the West Horsley office. There is a separate advert running for the equivalent role at Shepperton, so apply to that one instead if that site suits you better. Whichever site you are based at, there will be days when you are asked to work from the other one, so this is not a single site job.
WHAT YOU GET IN RETURN
Pay and benefits:
- £38,000 to £48,000 per year depending on experience
- Company pension
- Free parking at both offices
- 20 days holiday plus bank holidays, rising by a day for every year of service you complete, to 25 days once you hit five years
- Full support towards your ACCA studies, including a day off before every exam and a half day on the day of the exam itself
The part that is worth more than the salary:
- Breadth. The whole compliance cycle, not one slice of it. Bookkeeping, VAT, management accounts, year end accounts, corporation tax and self assessment.
- A real route to your own clients, and then to the team. You will start out preparing the work while a manager fronts the client relationship. As you get to know the systems and the clients, more of that contact comes your way, and there is a genuine route to running your own portfolio. Beyond that, and this is the part that matters most about this job, our client wants whoever takes it to grow into leading the accountants at this office: reviewing the work, being the person the team brings its queries to, and bringing on the trainees coming up behind you. It is earned rather than handed over on day one, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up. But it is the direction of travel, and it is the whole reason this role is pitched where it is.
- Commercial understanding. Working across so many different businesses teaches you what a healthy margin looks like in one sector and a worrying one in another, why one owner is losing sleep over cash and another is not, and how a business behaves when it is growing as well as when it is in trouble.
- A future proof skillset. Automation is already eating the narrow, repetitive end of this profession. Breadth and judgement across the whole cycle is what holds its value, and that is exactly what you build here.
- Being seen. A close knit team where your contribution is visible, and direct access to the people making the decisions rather than three layers to get through.
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THE ROLE
You will prepare work across the full compliance cycle for a varied client base. It is hands on and at times high pressure. Deadlines matter and accuracy matters, because what you produce goes on to be reviewed and put in front of the client by someone else.
To be clear about how it works day to day: to begin with, your job is to get the work right rather than to manage the client relationship. That sits with a manager at first. It does not stay there. The practice is hiring this role with the next two steps already in mind, your own portfolio and then the team, rather than filling a seat.
What you will actually be doing:
- Bookkeeping, including getting messy records into proper order
- VAT returns and the judgement calls that come with them
- Management accounts, and working out what the numbers are actually telling the owner
- Year end accounts preparation
- Corporation tax returns
- Self assessment and personal tax returns
- Setting new clients up properly on the systems from day one
- Raising queries and flagging anything that needs a conversation with the client
- Juggling multiple deadlines and priorities without letting accuracy slip
- In time, taking on more of the client contact yourself
- From there, reviewing other people's work, answering the team's queries and helping bring on the trainees
WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR
Experience and qualifications (essential):
- Minimum 6 years' experience in an accounting role
- That experience must be within UK accounting. This one is non negotiable.
- ACCA at Strategic Professional (Level 7), working towards chartered membership. We will also consider you if you have passed all your exams and are waiting on your practical experience to be signed off.
- Solid bookkeeping experience and confidence with cloud accounting software. Xero experience is an advantage rather than a requirement.
- A full driving licence and access to a car, for both the commute and the travel between sites
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The kind of person who does well here:
- Ready to lead, or close to it. You do not need to have managed a team before. You do need to want to. If you have reviewed someone else's work, checked a junior's file or helped a trainee find their feet, tell us about it. If you have not yet but that is where you are heading, tell us that instead.
- Curious. You want to understand why, not just what. You are interested in how businesses work, not only in getting the return filed.
- A strong communicator. Confident, approachable and good with people.
- A team player. You enjoy working alongside others rather than quietly behind a spreadsheet all day.
- Resilient and organised. You can handle pressure, manage competing priorities and still deliver high quality work.
BEFORE YOU APPLY, THE HONEST BIT
We would rather tell you this now than find out at second interview that it does not work.
- Neither site is easy to reach without a car, and West Horsley is the harder of the two. The office is on a farm site and it is genuinely rural. There is no public transport to it and nowhere to live within walking distance. A taxi from the nearest town would come to roughly £20 to £30 a day, which nobody wants to still be paying six months in.
- Shepperton, where you will also spend time, is not the easy option either. Unless you live in or around Walton, getting there without a car is a challenge in its own right. Because the two sites work together, you will be asked to spend time at both, so a full licence and your own car are needed.
Please put both postcodes into your maps app before you apply and look at the journey honestly. Getting to work is the single most common reason a role like this does not work out.
It is five days a week in the office. That is a deliberate choice rather than a hangover. There may be some flexibility on the odd day from home further down the line, once you know the systems and the clients inside out, but plan on the first couple of years being office based.
If that suits you, we would like to hear from you. If it does not, no hard feelings, far better to know now.
HOW TO APPLY
Apply with your CV and a short note telling us which part of the job above appealed to you most, where you are with your ACCA, and what your daily journey to West Horsley would actually look like. If leading a team is where you want to get to, say so. We do read them, and applications that skip this are unlikely to go further.
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