What's Your Beef - Best Practice accounting advice to fuel impressive growth

As businesses grow and evolve, it is important to ensure that the company’s accounting practices and financial structure also develops at a similar pace, in order to ensure the firm is able to take full advantage of the available opportunities.

This is particularly important for businesses such as What’s Your Beef Ltd, an up-and-coming seller of high-quality burgers and sauces based in Manchester. As a successful trader in the fast-moving food and beverages sector, the firm has worked with MWA to reinvent and modernise its accounting structure in recent years, in order to fuel the growth of the business.

In this case study, we look at how MWA has helped What’s Your Beef to implement accounting best practices to support the company’s evolution from a street food seller to a multi-site venue operator and beyond.

The challenge

Founded by Eddie Pope and Neil Standring, What’s Your Beef have become known for their ethically-sourced, high quality burgers and sauces, and have rapidly expanded the scope and scale of their business over the past few years.

The company’s revenue streams include organising mobile events and street food selling, as well as the manufacture and wholesale of burger sauces. Additionally, the firm operates a pair of direct-to-consumer F&B venues at Lane7 in Leicester and Gutterball in North Shields

What’s Your Beef was trading as a partnership when they first approached MWA, with no preexisting accounting procedures in place. Accounts were done at the last minute, nine months after the year-end, purely for the purpose of filing tax returns, and the company was keen to formalise and modernise their approach.

How MWA helped

MWA helped What’s Your Beef transition into a company structure shortly before receiving third-party investment from another of our clients. We introduced easy-to-follow accounting procedures, helping them to achieve best practice standards with a minimal amount of work. With us handling all of the processing, the What’s Your Beef team is given the time they need to run and grow their business.

Our services include:

• Weekly bookkeeping
• Raising weekly sales invoices to venue owners
• Payroll
• VAT
• Annual accounts
• Companies House compliance
• Corporation Tax
• Personal tax

We have also implemented the following procedural changes for the company:

Switching them over to the Xero accounting software platform
Introducing OCR scanning apps for invoices
Implementing Stripe app integration for recording card receipts
As they are opening in fixed-site venues, they will pass the VAT threshold and will need to register for VAT register. MWA has therefore restructured the company into a group, allowing them to avoid VAT registration for their events and sauces businesses, which would have otherwise resulted in a 20% drop in income.

Find out more

At MWA, we specialise in providing accounting and consultancy services for the food and beverages sector, and have a strong track record of helping clients to adapt quickly to their ever-changing needs.

To learn more about how MWA can help you implement the best accounting structure for your growing food and beverage business, contact us today. Call us on 0161 826 5259, send us an email at info@mwa-accounting.co.uk, or fill in our online contact form.