Boox - accountants any feedback?

[Chart Accountancy]

I am writing this honest review because I am sick at the way in I have been financially exploited by BOOX accounting and my trust in BOOX advice has been abused to the benefit of BOOX.

I write also for the purpose of warning anyone, who like myself, is a healthcare professional turned independent service provider, to avoid BOOX accounting specifically, but also to avoid this particular category of accountancy service provider in general with their over priced monthly fees, of which BOOX is but one particularly obnoxious example. (My advice is to seek out a reputable accountancy firm yourself. You'll probably find that you'll get a comparable service at a fraction of the price, once you look at what you shell out over the course of a year).

Here's my story:
I was approached by a representative from BOOX through my work as a longterm agency contract worker in 2015 I was initially happy with the arrangement to follow the instructions of my "dedicated" accountant and the BOOX app. It was not until I entered a strange period of no work and no income that I started to notice that the advice from BOOX was not always sound, as follows:
1. I became aware for the first time that I didn't need to be VAT registered, but I was paying BOOX for the VAT related services they said they needed to do a total of £11.00 per month plus VAT. The problem with this is that I was only registered for VAT because my dedicated accountant had presented it to me as a means of making extra income. At no point did the individual tell me that intact VAT is just about collecting and passing on tax money on behalf of the inland revenue. The dedicated accountant never told me at the time he got me to agree on the basis of his misleading and inappropriate advice that BOOX would be charging me for the privilege of collecting government taxes. So BOOX bags an extra £139.00 over 12 months added to their already hefty accountancy app fees. This is dishonest. This lacks transparency. It's just crooked. Avoid them.
2. Since December 2016 and this year I have experienced a situation in which incomes via the company have vanished, nevertheless BOOX accounting saw fit to continue to apply a full charge (£110.00 every month) for 5 months. During this time BOOX earned £550.00 in charges from me. In that same time my dedicated accountant insisted that as I was not earning anything I could be paid £0.00 (even though I still was doing work to build up my company) and on top of this I was not even given permission, according to the BOOX app to claim my expenses. When I pointed out that BOOX accounting app had authorised their fee of £110.00 each month, which was an expense, they informed me that this was a valid expense, for which they could go into my company funds to recuperate. However the other expenses could not be recuperated until I had income returned. So between December 2016 and May 2017, BOOX got paid from my company account £550.00 and I got paid £0.00 salary and £0.00 expenses. I have since learned that this advice is just wrong, but hey-ho- it paid BOOX.
3. BOOX are now telling me that despite making £0.00 since December 2016, despite having been paid £0.00 in salary and expenses this year, that I have made a profit and that I have to pay a tax bill of several hundreds of pounds !!!
This gives you a flavour of these people. I do not trust BOOX. I have seen that they are self serving and they exploit the ignorance of professionals who are too busy working to know that they are being charged through the nose for a mediocre and self serving set up.
I can only pray that they disappear under the weight of their own iniquitous practises.

I often see clients that come to me from some of the well known contractor accounting firms with comments that they are not happy because they are not receiving enough guidance from their dedicated accountant if their circumstances do change. The reason is that many of these firms concentrate on marketing and increasing their client portfolio of clients in a fixed type of service. If anything is out of the box, often the dedicated accountant is not experienced to advise which is where all goes wrong.

[craigy1874]

For a start 'going limited' is a terrible term.

How on earth does 'going limited' suggest anything other than a tax dodge. You are setting up your own business to trade as a limited company. Maybe I am just being pedantic but I really cannot stand that term.

Secondly, the recent 'complaint' doesn't seem that fair and I think the problem stems from this 'monthly fee'. As far as I am concerned, being an accountant, the fee is an annual fee, payable in monthly instalments. Monthly fees do give the indication that if there is no activity in that month, there should be no fee. If this is the case then great, but if not, then people have to stop advertising monthly fees.

There is still a certain amount of work involved in dealing with a limited company and not a massive amount of difference to a set of financial accounts if the company has 6 months trade compare to 12.

I also don't like 'dedicated accountants' and feel that anyone of a senior level should be able to deal with any particular client, but maybe that's just me...