A client asked me last year to take over raising his sales invoices. Forty minutes of my month, and he'd have paid for it without blinking. I said no.
Almost every accountant's pitch is a version of "we'll take it all off your plate". I don't want it all.
TL;DR: I won't raise my clients' sales invoices, chase their debtors, or approve their supplier payments. Not because the work is beneath the fee, but because an owner who stops touching their own numbers loses the instinct that keeps a business solvent. That instinct is a control.
What I Won't Take Off Your Hands
Four things: raising your sales invoices, chasing your debtors, approving your supplier payments, and knowing without opening an app what's in the bank and what you're owed.
None are technical accounting tasks. Each is a decision dressed up as admin. When you invoice is a call about cash. How hard you chase is a call about a customer relationship.
I'd rather have a client who argues with my management figures than one who nods at them. The arguing client is still looking.
What Goes Wrong When the Owner Stops Looking?
Three anonymised patterns I see repeatedly. A client who couldn't tell me whether a five-figure invoice had ever gone out, because raising invoices had become "the accountant's job". It hadn't, and he found out three months late.
An owner who built a growth plan assuming customers paid in thirty days, with no idea what his debtor days were. Coface's 2025 UK payment survey puts the average payment delay across UK companies at 32 days (Coface, 2025). His plan was out by a month of working capital.
And the client who asked me to approve the supplier payment run, so nobody with the context looked at it again. A duplicated subscription sat there for a year. UK Finance recorded £75.6 million of authorised push payment losses hitting businesses in 2025 (UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026). Invoice redirection works when the approver has no sense of what the business buys.
None were bookkeeping failures. They happen when the person with the context stops touching the numbers, and the person touching the numbers hasn't got it.
The Split I Ask Clients to Repeat Back to Me
Here is what I take, without apology. The integrity of the ledger, the compliance, the year end, the tax position, and the argument about what the numbers mean.
The line fits in one sentence: I own the accuracy, you own the awareness.
There is a legal edge people forget. Section 386 of the Companies Act 2006 puts the duty to keep adequate accounting records on the company, and section 387 makes it an offence by "every officer of the company who is in default", carrying up to two years' imprisonment on indictment (legislation.gov.uk). That duty sits with the director, not with me. The same non-delegable logic runs through director ID verification and who owns your cloud ledger data.
What If You Genuinely Don't Have Time?
Then hire inside your business, not inside mine. A one-person trade business has no office manager, and telling that owner to do credit control between jobs isn't realistic.
The answer is a bookkeeper or a VA on your side of the wall, whichever ledger you run, Xero or QuickBooks. What I won't be is both the person raising the invoice and the person checking it was raised, because then no second pair of eyes is left. Small businesses rarely have formal segregation of duties. The owner's daily contact with the numbers is the control.
Am I Just Doing Less for the Same Fee?
No. I charge for judgement, not keystrokes, and it gets better when you stay close. Conversations start from shared understanding instead of me explaining your business back to you, which is why I run a month-end close for clients who didn't ask for one and why I cap my client list rather than absorb volume.
Around 38 businesses close every day because they are not paid on time, costing the UK economy £11 billion a year (GOV.UK, March 2026), and one in 200 companies entered insolvency in the twelve months to 31 August 2026 (Insolvency Service). Few of those owners were short of a bookkeeper. Plenty were short of a feel for their own cash.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should my accountant do my invoicing and credit control as well?
They can, and many will. My view is you keep both if you can. Invoicing timing and chasing decisions are commercial judgements and you hold the context. Hand over the ledger, keep the contact.
What should a small business keep in-house rather than hand to an accountant?
Take back four things this month: raising sales invoices, chasing debtors, approving supplier payments, and a rough sense of your bank balance and debtor book. Everything downstream, including bookkeeping, compliance and tax, is fair game to outsource.
Why won't my accountant take on all the day-to-day bookkeeping admin?
A good one will take the bookkeeping. The pushback is about approval and chasing: if the same person records a transaction and authorises it, your business has lost its last independent check.
If you want a second opinion on where that line should sit in your business, get in touch. I'm happy to walk through your setup and say what I'd hand back.