Terms of Business

These terms apply to the accounting, tax and related services that Oakridge Accounting Limited ("we", "us") provides to you. They form part of our agreement with you, together with your Letter of Engagement and the schedule for each service in it, your Fixed Price Agreement, and anything we later agree in writing to change them. If one of those signed documents says something different from these terms, the signed document applies, and a service's own schedule applies to that service.

We work with businesses and the self-employed. Nothing in these terms takes away any right you have by law. Use of the client portal as software is covered separately by our Terms of Service, and how we look after personal data is set out in our Privacy Notice.

We provide the services listed in your Letter of Engagement for the fixed monthly fee in your Fixed Price Agreement. Within those services you can ask us questions as often as you like. If an answer needs extra research or analysis beyond what we can readily provide, we will tell you and agree a price in writing before we start.

Anything outside your signed services is not included in the fixed fee. That covers work our schedules list as excluded, and anything unexpected, such as an enquiry or investigation by HMRC. We will agree the price with you in writing before we start any of it (we call this a Change Order). We do not charge extra because your records reach us late; if that keeps happening, the remedy is set out in the next but one section and in your Letter of Engagement.

If you add or remove a service part-way through the year, we will document it as an amendment to your Letter of Engagement and a new Fixed Price Agreement for the months that remain.

Each package includes a monthly allowance of transactions: Sole Trader Essential, 50; Sole Trader Plus, 150; Limited Company, 200; and Scale, 500. A transaction is each line that comes through your business bank and card feeds, counted by calendar month.

Going over your allowance in up to two calendar months in any rolling 12 months does not change your fee. If you go over in a third, we will move you to the next package up from the following calendar month, after telling you in writing, and confirm it as an amendment to your Letter of Engagement. Sole Trader Plus and Scale have no larger package, so there we will agree a revised fixed fee with you instead. If you stay within a smaller package's allowance for six calendar months in a row, you can ask to move down to it. The full wording is in your Fixed Price Agreement.

• Our fee is collected monthly by direct debit, on the dates and for the amounts in your Fixed Price Agreement. Any VAT that applies is shown there.
• Fees that are not ours to set, such as the government fee for filing a confirmation statement, are passed on at cost and shown separately.
• We will not change the fixed fee during the period your Fixed Price Agreement covers, except by an amendment you have agreed or a move to the next package up under the transaction allowances above. A change for a later period needs at least one month's written notice from us.
• If a payment fails or is late, please tell us and put it right promptly. After telling you, we may pause our work until the amount is paid. Where the law allows, we may also charge statutory interest and compensation on late payments by a business.

We can only keep your books and returns up to date, and keep our fee fixed, if we work together:

• Give us complete, accurate and timely information, and tell us promptly about anything that changes your circumstances. We rely on what you give us and do not audit it.
• Keep your business bank and card accounts connected to your accounting software through a live bank feed, and reconnect it promptly if it stops. Unless we have agreed otherwise in writing, we do not enter bank statements by hand from emails, spreadsheets or PDFs.
• Send us your purchase invoices and receipts as they arise, and in any event within 10 days of the end of each month, and answer our questions about transactions promptly.
• Raise and send your own sales invoices to your customers. We do not do this for you. Where you have connected a payment provider we support, we post that provider's sales to your books once you have confirmed that they look right.
• Authorise us with HMRC and Companies House where our services need it, and forward anything you receive from them in good time. They are not obliged to copy us in.
• Check and approve returns, accounts and submissions before we file them. You remain legally responsible for them, and for filing and paying on time.

We are not responsible for a missed deadline, penalty or interest that results from information or records reaching us too late for us to deal with them in time.

If your records are late we will tell you. If they are repeatedly late we will talk to you and try to help. If it continues, we may end our engagement, because delays affect the service we can give all of our clients. We would then give you one month's written notice, ending on the last day of the calendar month following the month in which we give it.

• We carry out our work with reasonable care and skill, and follow the Code of Professional Ethics of the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT).
• Unless a schedule says otherwise, we compile accounts from the records and explanations you give us. We do not carry out an audit and do not give any assurance that your records are free from error or fraud.
• Our advice is given on the law and practice as it stands on the day we give it. We are not responsible if you act on it later without checking with us that it still applies, or for losses caused by a later change in the law or in HMRC practice.
• We communicate with you through the Messages tab of your client portal, so there is one complete record. When we send you a message we email you a link to it. Please reply in the portal, not by email.
• The figures in your portal are as current as the information you have given us and what we have coded so far.

We keep your affairs confidential. We share information only where you ask us to, where the law or our regulator requires it, or with the software and service providers we use to do our work and which are described in our Privacy Notice.

For the records we keep about you, we are the data controller. Where we process personal data on your behalf as part of a service, such as the employee details used for payroll, we act as your data processor on the terms in that service's schedule. We keep client records for six years after our engagement ends, unless the law requires a longer period (identity-check records are kept as the Privacy Notice describes).

The law requires us to check the identity of our clients and, for a company, of its directors and owners, before we act and as long as we act, and to keep watching for anything unusual. You agree to give us what we need for this promptly. If we cannot complete these checks, we may decline to act or stop acting, and we are not responsible for any delay or loss that causes.

We may be required to report suspicions to the authorities. If we do, the law may prevent us from telling you.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow us to limit.

Subject to that, our total liability to you for all claims arising from our services, whether in contract, negligence or otherwise, is limited to £250,000 for any one claim or series of connected claims. That is the amount of our professional indemnity insurance cover for each claim.

Otherwise, and as far as the law allows, we are not responsible for:

• loss that results from information or records you gave us being wrong, incomplete or late, or from your not acting on our advice or not replying to us or to a tax authority promptly;
• penalties, interest and surcharges that arise because of any of those things;
• loss caused by a failure or outage of a bank, software provider, payment provider or tax authority's online service that is outside our control; or
• indirect or consequential loss, or loss of profit, however it arises.

We act for you alone. Our work is for your use and is not advice to anyone you share it with, and we accept no responsibility to anyone else for it. Nobody else can enforce these terms under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999. Please tell us promptly if you think something has gone wrong, so that we can put it right.

As required by AAT, we hold professional indemnity insurance. Our insurer is AXA XL Insurance Company UK Limited, 20 Gracechurch Street, London EC3V 0BG. The policy covers professional services provided in the United Kingdom.

• You can end our engagement by giving us one month's written notice. It then ends on the last day of the calendar month following the month in which we receive your notice, as your Fixed Price Agreement says. Payments falling due up to and including the one collected in that final month remain payable.
• We can end our engagement on the same notice, for example if records are repeatedly late, if payments are not made, or if we can no longer act for you for professional reasons.
• We may stop acting at once if the law or our professional rules require it, such as when we cannot complete our identity checks, or where there is a conflict of interest we cannot manage.
• When it ends, we will respond to a proper professional clearance request from your new accountant and hand over what you are entitled to. We keep the records the law requires us to keep.

If you are unhappy with any part of our service, please tell us first at complaints@oakridge-accounting.com. We will look into it and reply to you. If we cannot resolve it between us, you can use the independent complaints process of the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT). A complaint about how we handle personal data can also be made to the Information Commissioner's Office.

• These terms, with the documents listed at the start, are the whole agreement between us about our services.
• We may update these terms. For a change that matters, we will give you at least one month's notice. If you do not accept it, you can end our engagement as set out above.
• Neither of us is responsible for a delay or failure caused by something outside our reasonable control.
• If part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies.
• Notices to us go to our registered office or to the email address above; notices to you go to the address or email we hold for you or through your client portal.
• These terms, and any dispute about them or our services, are governed by the law of England and Wales, and its courts have exclusive jurisdiction.

Oakridge Accounting Limited is a company registered in England and Wales under number 17115678, with its registered office at 24-26 Regent Place, Birmingham, West Midlands, B1 3NJ. We are licensed and regulated by the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT), licence number 1010064. Our VAT number is 520699383, and we are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under number ZC140562.