This one is for accountants: how we work, and why your client is safe with us

If you are an accountant and a client has told you a firm wants to make a capital allowances claim on their commercial property, your guard has probably gone up. It should. You have likely seen the bad version, and you may have read the threads where your peers describe it. We have read them too, and we agree with almost everything in them. This article is written for you, not your client, because the easiest way to earn your trust is to show you we already know what you are worried about.

We know the thread you are thinking of

There is a well-known discussion on AccountingWEB where an accountant describes a client who was cold called by a capital allowances firm. The claim had been built from a telephone interview rather than a site visit, fed into a generic template. The figures contained basic errors, including an adjustment to turnover that should never appear in a capital allowances claim. When the accountant raised concerns, the firm rang the client directly to belittle them and promised 100% acceptance by HMRC. The accountant steered the client to a firm that did the work properly and showed it, and everyone slept better for it.

That thread is a fair description of the worst of our industry, and if that is your mental model of a capital allowances firm, we do not blame you. Our entire point is that we are the firm the accountant moved the client to, not the one they moved them away from.

So here is exactly how we work

No jargon, no reassurance theatre, just the process, so you can judge it the way you would judge any other adviser:

• We apply HMRC’s own published guidance to the specific property and source every figure. We do not build claims from a generic template, and we do not ask anyone to trust a number they cannot check. The work is a desktop report, produced through our own system, and we call it that rather than dressing it up as a survey.
• We check the tax history before anything goes forward. We confirm the fixtures have not already been pooled, and we check whether a section 198 election was made on acquisition. We know this is where the real risk sits, in the due diligence around prior claims and elections, not in whether someone visited the site.
• The report is documented to withstand an enquiry. We do not rely on HMRC being too stretched to look. We assume they might, and we build accordingly.
• A capital allowances claim adjusts the capital allowances pool. It does not touch turnover. If you ever see one of our claims doing something to a client’s turnover, something has gone badly wrong and we want to hear about it, because it will not have come from us.
• It is submitted through a regulated accountancy firm, and you are welcome to review everything first, or to be the one who includes it in the return.

On “100% success rates”

You already know why that claim is meaningless, but it is worth us saying it so you know we are not going to wave it at your client. HMRC processes most claims without scrutiny because it is resource-constrained. A claim being accepted is not evidence it was sound; it may just mean nobody looked. We would never market a success rate to your client as though it proved anything, because you and we both know it does not. The real measure is whether the claim would survive an enquiry, and that is the standard we build to.

What we ask of you

Nothing except scrutiny. Ask us to show you the working and how we reached every figure. Ask who did the work and what their qualifications are. Ask how we have treated the acquisition history and any election. If our answers are vague, hold us to account. They will not be. The firms that damage our industry are the ones that get cagey when an accountant starts asking questions. We get more comfortable, not less, because the questions are exactly the ones we have already answered for ourselves before submitting anything.

Your client trusts you, and they should. We are not trying to get between you and them. We do one specialist job that sits just outside a general practice remit, we do it to a standard you can verify, and we hand it back to you. If that is the kind of firm you are willing to work with, we would be glad to show you the detail on any live case.