Forty minutes east
Accountants for Manchester businesses
City centre, MediaCityUK, Trafford, the southern suburbs
We've worked with Manchester clients for about as long as the firm has existed.
We keep a working address at Piccadilly Plaza for client meetings, year-end signings, and the occasional onboarding where someone wants to walk into a room and shake a hand. Most months we don't need it — the work happens through Xero, email and the phone — but having a real Manchester address matters when it matters.
The shape of our Manchester work
The city is too big to treat as a single market, so the work splits across a few clusters.
City centre and the Northern Quarter
Independent hospitality, agency and creative businesses, professional services. Firms that have outgrown a sole-practitioner accountant but don't want to be a number at one of the national consolidators. This is where most of our newer Manchester work comes from.
Salford and MediaCityUK
Production companies, broadcast suppliers, post-production studios. Mostly project-based revenue, with all the cash-flow complications that involves. We do a lot of work here on retentions, milestone billing and the awkward middle ground between freelance and permanent staff.
Trafford and Altrincham
Heavy on legal and consultancy work. Succession planning comes up regularly here — partly because the demographic skews older, partly because a fair number of these firms are second or third generation and the founders are finally letting themselves think about what comes next.
South Manchester and into the Cheshire fringe
Independent retail, healthcare practices, smaller construction firms working housing developments out towards Wilmslow and Macclesfield. The kind of clients where the M56 stops being a city boundary and the Manchester / Cheshire distinction gets blurry.
What clients tend to come to us for
The compliance work first, because if you don't do that well nothing else matters. Statutory accounts, corporation tax, VAT under MTD, payroll, CIS for the construction firms, self-assessment for directors. That's the baseline, on monthly packages from £275.
Beyond compliance, the work that actually moves the needle for Manchester businesses tends to involve:
- R&D claims for tech firms that genuinely qualify. We don't do R&D claims for firms that don't, because most aggressive R&D providers are about to find out HMRC's view of weak claims.
- Funding structure for scale-ups, including SEIS and EIS work for founders raising their first proper round
- Cross-border tax for the increasing number of Manchester businesses trading with the EU, US or Asia
- Tax planning before the year ends, not after, and certainly not in a phone call the week before filing
- Director-level advisory through our Opus Counsel service, for businesses that need a finance brain but can't yet justify a full finance team
Visit the office
Piccadilly Plaza is two minutes from Manchester Piccadilly station. If that isn't convenient, we come to you — most of the city's clusters are within thirty minutes of the office.
Head office (Chester)
Bretton HouseBell Meadow Business Park
Pulford
Chester CH4 9EP 01244 44 55 99