Accounts and Legal Avis 

Accounts and Legal managed our migration to Xero from Sage and have done an excellent job, providing much needed technical guidance that we did not have in-house. Very impressive all round.

The service I've received from Accounts & Legal over the past year has been nothing short of fantastic. They identified refunds I was due from HMRC and processed them on my behalf, corrected some historical issues with previous submissions and offered to handle my Self Assessment (had I not already submitted it earlier in the year).

My VAT returns are handled efficiently and quickly, I'm reminded of filing dates with HMRC and Companies House, and I can concentrate on bringing in revenue rather than paperwork.

Save your money and don't go with Accounts and Legal. These people are a joke and a poor excuse for accountants. The service they provide is terrible, bordering on non existent. One month I had a basic question about reconciling expenses which I emailed to my 'accountant'. I waited for more than an entire month for a reply. Next thing I get from them was not a reply to my straight forward question but a monthly bill. They clearly have no problem in sending out monthly bills even when they cant answer a simple question. I then contacted them and asked them what they were charging me for as in the last month I clearly received no service from them whatsoever. Well at this point my account handler was quick to get on the phone with a poor excuse for them not getting back to me (had been on leave....blah blah blah). However to this day I am still not clear about the answer to my question and my accounts still have numerous unreconciled transactions in them as I am still not sure how best to reconcile these transactions. I was hoping my accountants could explain this to me but it seems they are too busy sending people monthly bills or going on leave to actually do any accounting for their clients. Of course the accountants have done nothing since but send me more monthly bills.

In another case I recently received a letter from Barclays asking
me to answer a few questions about my tax status. In this letter Barclays clearly states that they are unable to give me any information on how to fill in this form and If I need any further clarification I should receive this from my accountants. So, as I was unclear about how to answer the questions in this letter I sent the letter to my account handler at Accounts and Legal for some clarification. Shortly afterwards my account handler got back to me saying he did not understand the letter and I should ask Barclays about it. This clearly shows he didn't even read the letter because it clearly states that Barclays is unable to provide me with an information on how to fill in the form.

Please also keep in mind you do 99% of the work, IE, you do all your daily inputing into Xero of transactions, expenses and what have you with no help from Accounts and Legal. Really all they do is your tax return (as they struggle to even answer a basic question) which I am not even confident they can get right. It is clearly not worth spending over £100 per month for this poor service when I could just pay a real accountant £100 at the end of they year to assist with my tax return. Plus I will probably have to work out my tax return at home myself anyway just to make sure they are doing their job properly because in the 9 or so months I have been with them I cannot confidently say they have done anything particularly right.This defats the entire point of using them.

Also an accountant should be someone who knows your accounts, your business and your financial situation and be able to advise you on the best ways to save on paying too much tax and what have you. These people never look at your accounts other that when doing your tax return, thus they will never know enough to give any of their clients individual advice like that which I mentioned above. So you wont be making any tax savings by using them as you should with an accountant.

Additionally one of the reasons I decided to use them in the beginning was because they could provide Legal assistance as I had a few questions about T&C's documents which I had created but wanted to be reviewed by a lawyer.Firstly their fee was not cheap at about £500.00 to review a document which was less than 20 pages long. The problem was that all that was corrected was grammar mistakes. Not once did they advise that perhaps I should add a specific clause to further protect my small business or anything like this. This is the kind of advice I wanted as I am not a lawyer and wrote the T's and C's myself. I figured it cant be perfect and I am sure I must be missing a few vital things. Well I received no suggestions from Accounts and Legal in this regard. No advice on adding or emitting any content but just served as a glorified £500 grammar checking service leaving the content pretty much as I had written it. Not worth £500.00.

Update: 28/03/19

I wanted to post an update to this review. Accounts & Legal did read my original review and made me aware of that. However, since then I do feel that they have made an effort to improve the service they have been giving me. One of my account managers has been particularly helpful and responsive which is quite a big change from a few months back. Thus I am happy to upgrade them to 3 stars.Hopefully their service will continue as it has recently been.

Snappy website promises a professional service. Unfortunately, once you are a paying customer they do the minimum possible at the latest possible moment. To date they have sat on my accounts for six months. They keep promising to finish by a given date, miss the date, give a new date. This happened from July to February this year to the point where we are now just two weeks before the filing deadline so it will be impossible for them to do more than just post the accounts I supplied them (which I could have done for free anyway). They do not respond to emails or provide any form of customer support. Overall, a slick marketing operation with nothing to back it up. AVOID at all costs.