French company accounts

After four days huddled in the dark I have finally emerged from the gloom – only to find it’s pretty gloomy outside as well, so I guess I didn’t miss much. I’ve been working on our company accounts.

Sensible people running a company would keep on-going accounts and records, so that when the accountant calls to say ‘we need your information next week’ they can calmly pull it from a drawer and drop it off at the accountants office the same day.

Unfortunately we are not sensible, or well-organised, and after calmly telling the accountant I’d ‘drop them off in a couple of days’ I thought I’d better make a start. We are 11 months into our companies financial year so it isn’t very practical to put it off much longer.

Hence my days in the gloom, staring at numbers I have scribbled on bits of paper throughout the year and desperately trying to remember what they were for. Was that 20 euros on an unmarked receipt the payment for a book…or lunch? And do either qualify as company expenses? Did Mr X ever pay that 500 euros he owes us? If so, where did we put it? You get the idea.

We manage to get plenty of them completely wrong, including a peculiar ability to pay company cheques into our private bank account – and promptly spending the money.

What actually happens is that people pay us a small amount of pounds, electronically or by cheque, and we know that if we pay a small sterling cheque into our French euro business bank account the whole amount will disappear in a flash of bank charges. So we pay them into our personal sterling account, always intending to transfer them all as one combined cheque later on.

This is not a bad idea usually. In a year when the euro rate falls from 1.5 to the pound to 1.1 to the pound it is less clever, since any saving in bank charges is small compared with the large loss on exchange rates. You can’t win them all, as they say.

By the way, be careful if you do this. Our accountant told us it wasn’t a problem – but it means the taxman can demand to see your private bank statements as well as your company ones. So if you do have dodgy transactions that you aren’t reporting properly (tut tut!) it isn’t a good idea.

Our accountant charges a ‘mere’ 2,000 euros a year. This is a pretty good rate (for them) since we probably only have 100 transactions a year to account for – in effect we pay 20 euros per accounting entry. So a book that cost five euros in the shop ends up costing 25 euros. Unfortunately in an attempt to stop the tax man and social contributions from devouring every last cent of income it is pretty much necessary to have an accountant involved at all stages in France, like it or not.

They also make an extra charge for special insurance that covers the possibility of an investigation into our account by the tax authorities. If you don’t pay insurance you are taking the risk that you accountant will spend hours ‘helping the taxman with their enquiries’ (i.e. having lunch with them) and then charging you 100 euros an hour for the privilege.

The way they described it, it sounded clear that if we didn’t pay the insurance we could be certain of an extensive enquiry (wink, wink, subtle threats), but perhaps I was being over-sensitive. We paid up anyway.

Unfortunately the sheer joy at finishing our company accounts is somewhat less than it might be, since 29 May is the deadline for private tax returns. Which means it needs to be posted tomorrow. Which means I’d better get off this computer and back into the gloom – I’ve got rather a lot to be getting on with…