Most business owners ask this question the wrong way round. They look for a turnover figure that says the moment has arrived.

There isn't one. Nobody hits £50,000 and unlocks an accountant.

Ask a more useful question instead. How many hours a month does this take you, and what would you do with those hours if you got them back?

There's no turnover figure that tells you when to hand your books over. Most advice says there is. There isn't.

What we actually see when people come to us

New clients arrive in two very different states. Some bring cloud software that's already working. The bank reconciles, everything ties up, they know their numbers, and they know them now rather than three months from now.

Others bring bank statements and carrier bags of receipts. They've been running the business on instinct, and they genuinely don't know where they stand.

The second group often becomes the most rewarding work we do, because the difference we make is immediate. Getting a system in place changes how someone feels about their own business within weeks.

Neither group has done anything wrong. They've just been busy.

What poor bookkeeping looks like

The worst version is no bookkeeping at all.

One step up, and more common than you'd think, is working purely from the bank statement. Everything that went through the business account gets recorded, and anything else disappears.

That's where the money leaks. Expenses you paid personally, anything you paid in cash, VAT you could have reclaimed. None of it appears, so none of it gets claimed.

Then there's the middle ground, where most people sit. Some organisation, a rough feel for the numbers, business and personal expenses tangled together. Better than a carrier bag, nowhere near the full picture.

What good bookkeeping looks like

A cloud system, kept current. The bank balances, purchase invoices match the expenses, every claimable cost gets claimed and every reclaimable amount of VAT gets reclaimed.

The practical difference isn't tidiness. It's that you can answer a question about your own business on the seventeenth of the month, instead of waiting a fortnight for someone to tell you.

So when should you stop doing it yourself?

Two questions decide it, and neither involves your turnover.

How long does it take you? Say it takes six hours a month. That's most of a working day, every month, spent on admin. What would you do with that day? Win work, improve the business, or simply go home earlier.

Your time has a cost even when nobody invoices you for it. Most owners never put a figure on it, which is exactly why the bookkeeping stays where it is.

Are you getting it right? This matters more than people expect. Someone qualified doesn't just record what happened. They spot what you're entitled to claim and haven't.

That's also the case for using a qualified accountant rather than a friend who's good with numbers or someone who's run a business before. Good intentions don't find tax savings. Experience and qualifications do.

If you're weighing the cost of that against doing it yourself, we've written about what an accountant actually does for the money here: What does an accountant actually do?

Cloud accounting changed what you get for your fee

Ten years ago, a significant part of what you paid your accountant covered sorting through paperwork. Someone had to type it all in.

That work has largely gone. Bank feeds arrive automatically, some in real time. Reports build themselves, software now handles cash flow projections and budget forecasting, and it's improving quickly.

The useful consequence sits in how you spend your fee. If your accountant isn't sifting receipts, the same budget buys you something better. That could be time to sit down and talk about where the business is going.

That's the shift worth making. Most of our client meetings have very little to do with figures. They're about the business itself, and they only happen because the bookkeeping isn't in the way.

The honest answer

There's no threshold and there's no perfect moment. If your books take hours you'd rather spend elsewhere, or you suspect you're missing things you could claim, you've already answered the question.

Helping You Get The Business You Want

If you're spending your evenings on receipts, or you're not confident your records show the full picture, that's worth a conversation.

Get in touch and we'll look at what you've got and tell you honestly whether it needs us: carthyaccountants.co.uk/contact