You can change accountant at any point in the year. Your new accountant asks your old one for professional clearance and your records, registers as your agent with HMRC and handles the handover. Your part is approving them as agent and filling in one short form.
Plenty of business owners stay with an accountant they have outgrown because they expect switching to be a headache. In practice, almost all of it happens behind the scenes.
You can switch any time
There is no need to wait for your year end. You can move part-way through a year or a VAT quarter. If you join us mid-year, a one-off catch-up fee covers the months already passed, confirmed before you pay, and the full year’s accounts are then included.
What actually happens
Once you have joined and passed the standard identity checks, we write to your current accountant for professional clearance and ask for your records. It is a routine request between accountants, with a well-established etiquette.
We register as your agent with HMRC and collect what we need. From then on, HMRC writes to us rather than to you.
What you do
Approve us as your agent, forward any HMRC letters that arrive in the meantime, and complete our onboarding form once. That is it. Moving your records, the clearance letter and the HMRC registration are ours to handle.
The one thing to check
If your current accountant is part-way through something time-sensitive, such as a return due in the next few weeks, tell us. We will plan the move around that deadline so nothing is missed.
Otherwise, there is rarely a bad time to switch. Usually the best time is as soon as you realise you want to.
General information only, not advice for your circumstances.