Doing your own bookkeeping: how far can you go?
Nothing requires you to hand your bookkeeping to someone else. The law asks for accounts that comply, not for a provider. So the question is not whether you are allowed to, but how far it stays workable.
What is manageable on your own
A good part of routine bookkeeping calls for no particular skill, as long as the flows stay readable: taking payment, paying suppliers, filing documents as they arrive. Keeping a journal if the volume is low. Preparing a VAT return, provided you know how it is built from the accounts.
The marker is simple: as long as every bank movement matches a document without you having to go looking, you are inside what is manageable.
Where the limit moves
Two dials, not one. Time: past a few hours a month, those are hours taken from your own work, and you bill them to nobody. Risk: the more involved the flows become — VAT, payroll, transactions straddling two financial years — the more an error costs in interest and adjustments.
You keep the books yourself as long as both stay low. You hand them over when one of the two rises — not both, one is enough.
What actually happens
Nobody decides to let their bookkeeping slide. It settles in: a supplier paid with the personal card, just the once. Filing pushed to the weekend. Then the return falls due, and three months are missing.
What took ten minutes a week becomes two days in March, under pressure, with a deduction missed, VAT split across the wrong rates, and receipts that will never turn up.
Catching up is billed for the time it takes. It is the one line on an invoice that could have been avoided entirely.
Wondering whether the moment has come?
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