One sector, properly understood
Most accountants can produce a set of optical practice accounts. Far fewer can tell you whether your establishment passes the VATHLT2190 test, what proportion of a spectacle sale is genuinely exempt dispensing, or why your GOS income does not match your forecast because a fee determination arrived eight months late and was backdated.
We are a trading style of Buzz Accounting Ltd, a UK accountancy practice.
What we will not do
- We do not give clinical or GOC regulatory advice. Registration, supervision arrangements and professional standards are for you and your professional body.
- We do not process patient data. We work from the practice's financial records, and patient identifiable information should never be sent to us.
- We do not publish valuation multiples. There is no HMRC, NHS or GOC publication of goodwill, EBITDA or turnover multiples for optical practices. Anything circulating from brokers or the trade press is a market opinion, and we will not repeat it as though it were a fact.
How we work
Remote-first, across the United Kingdom, and genuinely across it: GOS fees, bands and even the structure of the examination differ between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Where a figure does not carry across a border we say so rather than leaving you to discover it.
What we look at first, and why
Three things, in this order, because that is the order in which they are worth money.
The VAT method. Not just whether you apportion, but on what basis and whether it would survive being asked. Since 1 October 2020 you no longer need HMRC's prior approval for a method — Revenue and Customs Brief 14 removed it — but what replaced approval is a standard: the method must be attributable to verifiable data and reflect an accurate representation of your own business practices, and it is your responsibility to ensure it does. A surprising number of practices are running a percentage somebody chose years ago, for a practice that has since changed shape. VATVAL12400 requires recalculation when branch numbers change, when the mix of optometrists and dispensing opticians changes, when the practice restructures, or when you move between buying in lenses and glazing in house.
Partial exemption, and the de minimis line. Exempt income restricts input tax recovery, and the de minimis test under regulation 106 is all or nothing rather than an allowance: £625 a month on average, £7,500 a year, and half of all input tax. Practices sitting just the wrong side of it are usually there by accident.
GOS cash timing. Which is a genuinely local question — see below.
Two things we will tell you that most advisers will not
There is no single national GOS payment date. PCSE publishes a payment diary with one row per legacy area, and across the sixty-nine areas listed the in-bank date runs from about the 7th of the month to the last working day. Two identical practices in different ICB areas can sit three weeks apart on receipts. Any cash-flow forecast built on a national assumption is wrong for most practices, and we look up your row rather than assuming.
And a GOS contract cannot be sold. Clause 12 of the General Ophthalmic Additional Services model contract says the contractor shall not give, sell, assign or otherwise dispose of the benefit of any of its rights under it. What the contract permits is variation of the contractor's own status — an individual becoming a partnership, with notice and a Schedule 3 application from each proposed partner — not transfer to a stranger. That single clause shapes every practice sale in this sector, and it is better understood before you go to market than during due diligence.
