How counters and holders can adopt the new fiscal year with confidence

The beginning of a new fiscal year presents its practice the opportunity to prepare the scenario for success.

Since adopting automation and optimizing workflows to keeping absence of legislation changes, there are several ways to position your practice for your most successful year so far.

In this article, we explore the steps and key ideas to help you sit a solid base for fiscal year 2025/26 and train your team to provide exceptional service and boost growth.

This is what we cover:

New legislation changes for fiscal year 2025/26

The Government has introduced a lot of legislation changes for fiscal year 2025/26, many of which will affect their practice, and their small companies and independent clients.

Here is a summary of the changes that must take into account that it will enter into force as of April 2025 (you can obtain a complete update in our new fiscal year article):

• Make digital prosecutor for income tax: Your clients can voluntarily register in this scheme, before the mandatory date of April 2026, when it will be applied to unique merchants and owners who have an annual income of £ 50,000 or more. You can participate in the private beta test phase now.
• National Employers Insurance: This rate increases from 13.8% to 15% on April 6, 2025. And the threshold that employers begin to pay the national insurance contributions (NICS) will fall from £ 9,100 to £ 5,000 per year.
• Employment Assignment: This allocation will be raised from £ 5,000 to £ 10,500 per year from April 6, 2025. The current threshold of £ 100,000 will be eliminated.
• Neonatal care: This is a new form of parental license that begins on April 6, 2025. It gives parents whose babies have neonatal care the right to take up to 12 weeks of additional license.
• Cause of growth and skills: The learning memory, which is a scheme to finance the training of apprentices, will be replaced by this new tax.
• Retail scheme, hospitality and leisure: This will be extended for fiscal year 2025/26.
• Minimum wages: As of April 1, 2025, the national decent salary will be £ 12.21. The national minimum wage will be £ 10 for employees between 18 and 20, and £ 7.55 for those under 18 and for apprentices.

Update your processes for the new fiscal year

Now is the perfect time for you to review your practice processes and identify ways to make them more efficient, so that you can provide more value to your customers.

From returning to commit your clients to highlighting the benefits of digital records and increasing your staff, there are many things you can do to make sure you prepare your practice for success.

Next, we cover them in more detail.

Check, reproduce and participate again to your customers

Retaining customers is essential for a successful and stable practice, but cannot trust that it happens automatically.

You need to establish a strategy.

It is important to reconnect with its existing clients at the beginning of the new fiscal year for several reasons:

• Understanding the objectives of your customers for next year will help you align your services with your needs. You can also improve your offers
• You can discuss the scope and changes in prices
• You can advise them on how to deal with relevant legislation changes.
• Acquiring new customers is expensive. A new customer can cost five times more than retain an existing client.

When establishing new prices, applying a fixed percentage increase in all areas can be the fastest approach. But without first reviewing the profitability of its customers, it will not know if it is effective.

It is worth taking the time to review your client’s rates and then organize your customer list in three categories:

• Profitable customers
• Breakeven customers
• Customers who are losing money.

In this way, you can adopt an individual approach to each group.

It may be difficult to have a price conversation with a non -profitable customer, since their rates may need to be significantly collected, but the fact is that even if it loses these customers, it will still be better.

When you can focus the conversation about the value that your practice can provide to the client, most customers will be delighted to pay more for that value.

If you receive a setback from your price increases, send some different options for your client, such as:

• Maintain its current price and reduce the scope of work
• Reimagine the scope of work and update the price to reflect that.

Show the benefits of digital records to customers

Moving your customers to the maintenance of digital records is beneficial.

It will save both your practice and your customers and release it to provide more added value services.

At the beginning of these discussions at the beginning of the fiscal year, he has time to train his clients and solve any problem without the stress of addressing fiscal deadlines.

Here are some points that you can raise with your customers:

• They can optimize their accounting processes, automate repetitive tasks and access the information quickly, allowing them to focus more on central commercial activities.
• Digital systems can improve precision and guarantee compliance with tax regulations, using automated calculations and validation verifications incorporated.
• The maintenance of digital records provides customers for real -time information about their financial performance and means that they can immediately make decisions. Cloud -based platforms also allow an exchange without documents and collaboration in real time, regardless of location (which is particularly useful for remote workers).
• Digital record maintenance systems can climb with customer companies as they grow. Digital solutions offer flexibility to meet changing needs if customers are expanding operations, adding new locations or increasing transaction volumes.

As an example, customers who work under the Construction industry scheme (CIS) Often, pay taxes and wait to receive a reimbursement of income tax once your statement has been processed.

There is a great incentive for these clients to move to digital accounting where they can capture income and expenses simply, present their early self -evaluation tax declaration and, ultimately, obtain their reimbursements faster.

Automate processes to make your practice more efficient

Automation processes allow you to remove your attention from the tedious manual tasks and release valuable time for more strategic activities.

Accounting software can eliminate the need for data entry integrating with bank foods, invoices and expenses receipts. This means that transactions can be imported, categorized and reconciling with a minimum intervention.

For example, Autoentry By Sage is a tool fed with AI that captures data of receipts and invoices photos and automatically loads it in Sage accounting.

By automating tasks at the beginning of the fiscal year, you can take advantage of efficient workflows and expedite operations from the beginning.

To assess which areas could automate, solve where your team passes most of the time:

• If you have to manually copy the accounting book figures to the tax preparation software, you can implement an integrated accounting software and taxes that are spoken to each other.
• If you are walking through receipt shoes, you can implement expenses management tools to track expenses and allow customers to take photos of your receipts and load them instantly.
• If the invorable time monitoring is demonstrating a lot of time, you can bring billing software that tracks your time and helps you create and send customer invoices efficiently.

Upskill and support your practice team

The new fiscal year is an ideal time to reevaluate the development needs of your team and take the time to increase, while everyone has a lighter workload.

Investing in continuous development not only helps to grow your practice and your team’s skills sets, but can also operate more efficiently.

In addition to offering access to external courses such as workshops and conferences, do not forget that it can be so useful to facilitate cross training opportunities within the practice team.

Development covers a wide area, but it can be easy for counters to focus only on developing central technical knowledge.

And while this is important for daily work, there are also more general skills that help counters to better serve their customers, including soft skills, cloud accounting, time management and customer service.

Final thoughts on fiscal preparation 2025/26

To continue growing your practice, you must address every new fiscal year as an opportunity to learn and adapt.

It is the perfect time to reflect on your processes, reconnect with your customers and consider new forms of work that will vigorize your team.

Reaching customers at this time allows you to reaffirm your commitment to provide exceptional service, address any concern or change in circumstances and align strategies for next year.