Bazza's blog spot

  There we were, reasonably happy with the People’s Energy supplying our electricity and gas supplies, at least from a tariff perspective, when they went out of business in September.  Our account was transferred, under the “Supplier of Last Resort” scheme, to British Gas.   I’m on the Priority Service Register (PSR), as I am disabled and we have no way of accessing the gas meter, and nobody whom we can ask.   I had requested the meter be read for over a year and was fobbed off with the excuse that because of Covid restrictions the meter could not be read.   Strange, as the meter is external to the house so there would have been no need to enter the house to read the gas meter, and the electricity readings were being sent via smart meter.   The gas meter, which I was told was not connected to the smart meter as it was incompatible, according to an email I had received from People’s Energy on 10 th August 2021 that someone was going to be reading the meter ...

    Rant time.  Again.   This time HMRC is the target of my ire.   (Takes deep breath to avoid killing keyboard, sucks thumb and blows while sucking to stimulate the vagus nerve which controls the heart rate (no, really – try it), in a vain attempt to bring it down to less than 120…)   So, as I had completed the filing of my company accounts for 2021, I decided to get the painful bit out of the way and cough up what I owed to HMRC.   I had changed my year end from 31 st August to 30 th September as my trading year actually began 1 st October, so I thought I’d align it at the start.  This meant that I actually had TWO corporation tax bills: the first due for the period 1 st September 2020 to 31 st August 2021, the second for the period to 30 th September 2021.   The amount due was duly paid 7 th October 2021, comprising the two amounts due.   I checked the Government Gateway and there were the payments against the filed periods. ...

  As I have aged, I’ve found myself tolerating fools less and less.  Whether it is on social media or in general life, especially business, I am now consciously having to bite my tongue to avoid appearing confrontational.   In a previous blog, I mentioned grammar and pronunciation (or at least, aspiration) of the letter “h”.   As a now officially card-carrying grumpy old man (having now attained a “certain age”) I find that tolerance of fools decaying on a daily, if not faster basis.   Some advice for people embarking on a career of bookkeeping.   Before you even consider it, first get some training or, at the very least, experience of the genre.   Having been a trained trainer in technical matters, I used to believe that there were no stupid questions:   I was wrong.   Some of the doozies I see posted by would-be bookkeepers and "businesspeople" on social media are so stupid that I seriously think these people should not only avoid bookkeepi...

This is a rant on the state of literacy and the misuse of grammar and punctuation in social media posts (in particular), and the lamentable lowering in standards of previously admirable broadcasters and their on-screen “talent”. One that really grinds my gears – the pronunciation of a hard “h” when using the letter in an acronym, for example saying "haitch" when talking about the “N haitch S”, which seems to now be the norm ( I know that language is evolutionary but…).  Every dictionary defines the spelling of “h” as “aitch” – so where is the leading hard “h”?  Go to almost any country in the world other than the UK or Ireland and they’ll look at you with raised eyebrows for aspirating the letter.  It’s only been for about 20 years that this abysmal habit has squeezed itself into general societal discourse. Ugh! Then there’s the abuse of the apostrophe where there shouldn’t be one, especially before an “s”. People, the apostrophe is there to abbreviate two words (wh...

  This may be controversial , but it’s my contention that the current situation in Ukraine was brought on, in no small part, by the West’s navel gazing and self-flagellation.  The shenanigans of (among many other issues) Partygate; the wokerati’s obsession with political correctness and cancel culture; the Green agenda; Biden’s totally inept actions over the withdrawal from Afghanistan and his likewise total ineptitude as Leader of the Free World: all these factors must have been contributory to emboldening sociopath Putin to believe that there was no threat from the West if he decided to invade.   It wouldn’t surprise me if Russia was actually a major financier of that odious Marxist organisation BLM – the enemy within… The irony of his excuse for invasion speaks volumes to the self-delusional state the man works under: to say that his justification for the invasion was to rid Ukraine of the Nazis that were wreaking genocide on the people of Ukraine is ridiculou...

  If you don’t know how to use the software you’re trying to run your business with, you need to do one of three things: Get trained in the software to a level sufficient for you to be able to use it properly or Pay someone who IS trained to use it on your behalf.  Someone like, oh, I don’t know, maybe a qualified bookkeeper? or Muddle through until it comes to an HMRC/Companies House calendar milestone and then panic… I don’t care what the ads say, bookkeeping is not just a matter of getting access to an accounting package and getting on with it – that path leads to almost certain disaster.  Running the books for a business is not as easy as they make out, especially if you run payroll.  That’s why we (the bookkeepers) are here to help, assuming that you value our services and expertise. Just to explain, you’re not only paying us for the time we spend sorting out your business accounts etc – you also pay for the time we spent getting qualified. What’s mor...

I don’t know about you guys, but several of my clients are, shall we say, less than IT-savvy and, while they try to overcome their technical shortcomings, quite often they fail.  In these cases, where they need immediate support, you have the choice of downing tools and visiting them on-site, which is not always practical, if possible, or taking over their PC/laptop and observing at first hand what they are actually doing and, if necessary, showing them what to do so the next time they have to do it they have, at least, the knowledge (if not the aptitude) to do it themselves . Having been in IT for many years and having had to support remote users on more than several occasions (including overseas users from the USA to Israel), I have experimented and used many such remote access products including (among others) LogMeIn, TeamViewer and, my current fave, AnyDesk.   Being a cheapskate, as I was using the software less frequently than now, I opted for the non-commercial usage ...

Let's face it - there are lots of nasty people out there in the ether, all hell-bent on extracting your hard-earned money from you.  Most will try legal means to deceive you.  For example, a Nigerian prince or other member of a royal family seeking to transfer large sums of money out of the country, and they'll give you a share just as long as you give them some bank details... legal in so far as it needs you to agree to give them the details.  (By the way, if you ever consider doing this, step away from the keyboard).   Then there is the stealth kind that drops a virus on your device if you're not protected and then they can do several naughty things to you, like recording key depressions when you type the bank access code, or the password to the credit card account. These, among other reasons, are why purchasing and installing a decent antivirus suite is an imperative.  The freebies are ok, to a point, but those usually require unscheduled interaction whi...

I’m going to sound like Uncle Albert in “Only Fools and Horses” by saying that, back when I was in IT (a lifetime ago – and I was in positions ranging from mainframe operator for an IT Bureau to the head of global Windows support for a major international bank) it was instilled into all of us that backup of data is a vital facility that would ALWAYS be used. People outside of the IT industry never appreciate that backing up of data is not just an investment in software or time and effort taken to run the backup – it’s protection of the time and effort already taken in creating the data the backup will be securing.   Software and applications can be replaced reasonably quickly if a device breaks.   Data takes an awful lot longer to recover if, indeed, it’s possible to do so without the data backup. There’s no need to spend a fortune on software for this - even if the data is being backed up by an automated process within the operating system, at least one has recourse to be...