At Capita LGS we recognise that accountancy services form the backbone of a council’s financial department, which is why we have developed and perfected a suite of accountancy services for local authorities that equip organisations to respond quickly and accurately to changes in their priorities as well as in legislation.
Our accountancy services have been tailored specifically to meet the needs of our local government clients and include:
Management accountancy and budget monitoring
We see the role of management accountancy as being essential in ensuring that strong cost control is mandatory for councils, rather than a goal to work towards. Our proven model involves:
- Developing close working relationships between our Management Accountants and Council Budget Managers, ensuring that efficient and challenging budgets are delivered
- Setting annual targets which are clearly understood by operational managers, achieving the correct balance between being challenging but also deliverable
- Utilising our expertise and knowledge to help train the budget holders and apply greater financial control.
Financial accounting
Our technical accountancy experts provide a number of services in order to ensure that the primary books of account for our clients are presented correctly and inline with statutory financial reporting standards, these include:
- Maintaining fixed asset registers as required for capital charging purposes
- Producing VAT returns and providing VAT advice and training to councils in relation to the taxation of income and expenditure
- Producing and reconciling control accounts
- Supporting the preparation of year-end statement of accounts
- Providing detailed advice on all aspects of accountancy
- Dealing with any queries raised by auditors.
Treasury management
We’ve been managing the transactional elements of cash management on behalf of our clients for a number of years now and understand how imperative it is to have rigorous controls in place when it comes to cash management. Our treasury services include:
- Maintaining bank balances between the limits prescribed and initiating dealings with our clients’ brokers accordingly
- Maintaining records of all loans and investments, including any transactions relating to them, and reconciling these records with our clients’ accounts
- Supplying information and advice to councils to enable the annual determination of borrowing limits required by statute
- Providing information to S151 Officers to ensure compliance within the borrowing limits
- Supplying councils with information on borrowing and investing, to facilitate the annual preparation of their revenue and capital budgets and the closing of accounts
- Day-to-day handling of cash and funds transfers
- Setting up bank accounts, potentially using aggregation across all accounts to save transferring funds within accounts
- Reconciling bank accounts, cash books and financial information systems.
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A reliable service providing consistent benefits
Our resource pool of qualified experienced accountants enables us to meet peaks in demand and to provide local authorities with stable and consistently high-performing financial services that are cost-effective due to economies of scale.
Once implemented, our financial services yield the following benefits to our clients:
- More efficient and informed financial reporting, allowing for better decision making
- Greater visibility for potential budgetary overruns
- Identification of cost ‘leakage’
- Efficient production of statutory accounts, significantly reducing audit fees
- Greater visibility of cash flow.
Find out more about our exchequer services and our bespoke financial services.