Accountant in Surrey

IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ BEFORE APPLYING. There are screening questions at the end and we do read the answers.

West Horsley or Shepperton, Surrey. Full time, permanent, office based. £35,000 to £40,000 depending on experience, plus company pension. Two positions available, one at each site.

Most accountancy jobs put you in a lane. You do VAT. Or you sit in a year end team and never see what happens next. Three years later you are very good at one thing and you still have no real idea how the rest of it fits together.

This role is the opposite of that. You will work across the whole compliance cycle, from a first set of messy records through to a finished set of accounts and the tax that follows, on a client base that runs across a wide range of industries and sizes.

Recruitment for this role is being handled by Beagle HR Ltd on behalf of our client, an established independent accountancy practice in Surrey with two offices, in West Horsley and Shepperton, and a team of around twenty. They work with owner managed businesses across a broad range of sectors and run on a modern cloud accounting stack. In a market full of cheap online accounting, they win work by being human, responsive and properly invested in how their clients are doing.

There are two roles going, one at each office. Tell us which suits you, or say if either works. Whichever site you are based at, there will be days when you are asked to work from the other one, so this is not a single site job.

WHAT YOU GET IN RETURN

• £35,000 to £40,000 depending on experience
• Company pension
• Free parking at both offices
• 20 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Support towards your ACCA or AAT studies if you want to keep going

Breadth. The whole compliance cycle, not one slice of it. Bookkeeping, VAT, management accounts, year end accounts, corporation tax and self assessment.

A real route to your own clients. You will start out preparing the work while a manager fronts the client relationship. As you get to know the systems and the clients, more of that contact comes your way, and there is a genuine route to running your own portfolio. It is earned rather than handed over on day one, and we would rather say that plainly than dress it up.

Commercial understanding. Working across so many different businesses teaches you what a healthy margin looks like in one sector and a worrying one in another, and how a business behaves when it is growing as well as when it is in trouble. That is very hard to pick up in a firm that keeps you in one department.

A future proof skillset. Automation is already eating the narrow, repetitive end of this profession. Breadth and judgement across the whole cycle is what holds its value, and that is exactly what you build here.

THE ROLE

You will prepare work across the full compliance cycle for a varied client base. It is hands on and at times high pressure. Deadlines matter and accuracy matters, because what you produce goes on to be reviewed and put in front of the client by someone else.

To be clear about how it works day to day: your job is to get the work right, not to manage the client relationship. That sits with a manager, at least to begin with. What comes with the role instead is variety, because you are not tied to one specialism, and a practice that will push you on rather than leave you where you started.

What you will actually be doing:

• Bookkeeping, including getting messy records into proper order
• VAT returns and the judgement calls that come with them
• Management accounts, and working out what the numbers are telling the owner
• Year end accounts preparation
• Corporation tax returns
• Self assessment and personal tax returns
• Setting new clients up properly on the systems from day one
• Raising queries and flagging anything that needs a conversation with the client
• Juggling multiple deadlines without letting accuracy slip
• In time, taking on more of the client contact yourself

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• Minimum 3 years' experience in an accounting role
• That experience must be within UK accounting. This one is non negotiable.
• AAT Level 3 or Level 4, or ACCA part qualified
• Solid bookkeeping experience and confidence with cloud accounting software. Xero is an advantage rather than a requirement.
• A full driving licence and access to a car, for both the commute and the travel between sites
• You will do well here if you are curious and want to understand why rather than just what, a strong communicator who is comfortable with people, a team player rather than someone who wants to sit quietly behind a spreadsheet, and resilient and organised under pressure.

BEFORE YOU APPLY, THE HONEST BIT

Neither site is easy to reach without a car. West Horsley is the harder of the two. The office is on a farm site and it is genuinely rural. There is no public transport to it and nowhere to live within walking distance. A taxi from the nearest town would come to roughly £20 to £30 a day, which nobody wants to still be paying six months in.

Shepperton is not the easy option either. Unless you live in or around Walton, getting there without a car is a challenge in its own right. Please put both postcodes into your maps app before you apply and look at the journey honestly. Getting to work is the single most common reason a role like this does not work out.

It is five days a week in the office. That is a deliberate choice rather than a hangover. There may be some flexibility on the odd day from home further down the line, once you know the systems and the clients inside out, but plan on the first couple of years being office based.

If that suits you, we would like to hear from you. If it does not, no hard feelings, far better to know now.

HOW TO APPLY

Apply with your CV and a short note telling us which part of the job above appealed to you most, and what your daily journey to your chosen site would actually look like. We do read them.