Bookkeeping operations — start here

Everything a new bookkeeper or an offshore admin needs to work this portfolio: what is ready, what is blocked, what to do about each, and what it pays. Built 21 August 2026 from the live Companies House verification of 15 Aug and four supporting registers.

Dispatch portal →

The working tool. Hand a whole client to an admin at an agreed price, or hand out a batch of ten tasks with the runbooks attached. Track everything to confirmed.

VAT queue →

Who can apply for VAT, who is only waiting on HMRC, and who is blocked. Six can apply, four are chases, five must not be touched.

Runbooks →

Sixteen task types, each written so someone new can do it without asking. These print onto every batch sheet automatically.

Rate & scope →

How big the job is, what splits offshore, and what is fair to pay — as a UK day rate and as a per-client package price.

The three things to know before anyone starts

1 · We cannot act as an agent for anybody. The practice holds no HMRC Agent Reference Number and no agent services account. That means no VAT application, no 64-8 and no return can be submitted by us on a client's behalf — 95 prepared 64-8 forms are sitting on file and none are usable. Every HMRC action has to run through the client's own Government Gateway with the director present.

An agent services account needs AML supervision first. One file says supervision is complete; the pack meant to carry the registration number leaves it blank, and the number appears nowhere else on the estate. Confirming whether that supervision actually exists is a ten-minute check that decides whether this is a same-day fix or a 45-day one — and it is worth more than any amount of admin throughput, because it is what lets one person act for all 44 clients instead of recovering 44 separate logins.
2 · The bottleneck is the Gateway, not willingness. 26 of 44 clients sit outside the Strong band and cannot simply sign in to their own HMRC account — the original email is on a dead domain and the registered mobile is lost, so the two-step code has nowhere to land. Until that is fixed, no VAT registration and no MTD filing is possible for them regardless of how ready they look on paper. Gateway recovery is the largest single block of work here and it is what converts the portfolio into billable recurring work.
3 · Ten a day works — ten VAT applications a day does not. The VAT-ready pool is six applications and four chases: one day's work in total. "Ten a day" has to mean ten items from the whole queue. The dispatch portal batches it that way — tasks, about admin-days.

The first ten days

Ordered by what is destructive if ignored, not by what is easy. Days 1–2 are genuinely urgent; a strike-off that completes dissolves the company and its assets pass to the Crown.

DAY 1

Stop the bleeding

Request the CRP Services auth code — it is posted and takes 5–10 working days, so every day of delay is a day added to the end. Object to all five live strike-offs. File W L Global's confirmation statement, which went overdue on 19 August, two days ago. Escalate Grays Servicing, which has no director at all and where nothing can be filed until an AP01 lands.

DAY 2

Clear the overdue confirmation statements

Ten of them at £50 each. This is the cheapest problem on the board to make disappear, and it is what triggers strike-off proceedings in the first place. Check the officer list matches before confirming — never confirm a record you know to be wrong.

DAY 3

Hand the four overdue accounts to the accountant

Musrau, PSY, Unitech and Dragon Flare all missed deadlines and the penalties escalate. The admin job is assembling records and chasing directors, never preparing accounts. Note that three of the four missed the same 31 July date — deadline monitoring is not running, so fix the process as well as the filings.

DAY 4–5

The VAT queue, end to end

Six applications and four chases. Get the turnover position in writing from each director first. Two of the six have caveats to clear — Unitech and Musrau both have overdue accounts, and Musrau and Global Wholesale both have the wrong director on our file.

DAY 6–9

Gateway recovery, in bands

Eighteen Strong clients go online; fifteen Partial need the helpdesk on 0300 200 3600; ten Weak need basics collected first. Batch the phone calls — four in one sitting beats four hold queues on four days. Set up the new live-domain email before each attempt, and move two-step verification to an authenticator app so this never happens again.

DAY 10+

Portals, then the record work

Forty-four portals are built and waiting. Book 45–60 minute sessions and treat the missing information as the agenda rather than a prerequisite. Then the thirteen director corrections, the personal codes and the outstanding ID. From here the dispatch portal drives the order.

Handing work off and getting it back

Add your admins in the dispatch portal

One line each. The portal tracks how many open packages each person is carrying.

Assign whole clients, or auto-assign evenly

Auto-assign spreads the heaviest packages first so the load lands evenly rather than alphabetically. Each package shows a suggested price built from its own tasks; adjust the agreed figure if you negotiate something different.

Export the handover file

Filter to one admin, export, and send them the JSON along with this folder. They work offline; every batch prints with its full runbooks attached, so they need nothing else and nobody to ask.

They work it to Submitted — never to Done

An admin can move a package as far as "Submitted for confirmation". That is a claim, not a completion.

Import the returned file and check the evidence

Import merges their progress into yours. Check the filings actually appear on the public register before you accept anything.

Confirm to Done — which is what pays

Only you can move a package to Done, and only Done triggers payment. Send it back if the evidence is not there.

Where the data came from, and what is still shaky

Everything here derives from _data.js — one file, one source of truth. Change a client there and the queue, the prices, the batches and the runbook counts all rebuild themselves. Sources, newest first: the live Companies House verification of all 44 companies on 15 Aug 2026; the Tier-2 accountant placement list of 4 Aug; the HMRC gateway recovery readiness sweep of 22 Jul; the VAT/UTR action instructions of 9–13 Jul.

Four things carried forward that would otherwise be repeated as fact.
Confidentiality. Every page in this folder shows Companies House authentication codes and Gateway identifiers. None of them may be sent to a client. Client-facing material is the welcome pack and the brand pack, not these. Identity documents are confidential and belong in each client's own ID & KYC subfolder — never loose, never attached to anything leaving the practice.