Day in the life: Rachel Nutt, partner at MHA MacIntyre Hudson

In the Accountancy Age Day in the Life careers series, we discover what accountants get up to during their working day.

Accountancy is a varied and diverse career choice, which offers numerous different roles. No two days are the same whichever route you choose.

In this series we get an insight into how accountants in both practice and industry typically spend their days.

Rachel Nutt is head of renewable and sustainable energy and tax partner at MHA MacIntyre Hudson.

6am – I’m straight up and outside, since it’s the summer the horses are fortunately living out in the field so I have an hour of riding around the farm (as opposed to the winter mucking out).  For me the fresh air beats a sterile gym every day of the week! I have time to think about the day ahead while riding. A long term client of mine is having some cash flow difficulties, and he emailed me late last night so I find myself thinking about what I need to do to advise him.

6.50am – Time to feed the farm cats who just don’t seem to be bothered to look for mice since we are so soft with them, instead they look at me in disgust that I didn’t feed them before the horses. I feed the chickens, collect the eggs and have a chat to our new little herd of belted Galloways over the fence. It’s my husband’s job to check on those when I’m back in the house.

7am – Our two and a half year old son is just waking up. We have morning milk and tea together (my son, husband and I) and a chat about what the day has in store for us all. Then I jump in the shower and get ready for the day before Mel arrives.

8am – Mel is my long term friend and does a brilliant job of looking after our son while my husband Jon and I are at work; we are both partners in our respective businesses, John is a solicitor. I realise our dog, a very lazy border terrier should have been outside with me from 6am but has instead been lounging on the sofa so I make him go outside and be a dog!

8.15am – I travel to my client meeting. I give the client with the cash flow problem a call from the car; we have one quick fix I can recommend but he needs to speak to our funding arm asap. I make another call and set that up.

9.30am – I arrive at my first meeting of the day. Just before I go in I check my email. The daily update to the board on the state of the firm’s cash balances comes through about now: all good! We’ve worked with the client for the last three years and we are discussing their corporate structure and whether they are fully prepared for Brexit. The client buys a lot of products from overseas, especially Europe so we discuss the need for some advice and setting up an authorised economic operator status which I will get my duty colleague to pick up in detail. The main thrust of the meeting is to merge the company’s premises in various locations into a new company along with a sizeable amount of spare cash. Various factors are driving the planning; aside from ring fencing the risk they need to think about a sale of the trading side in a few years or a management buyout. This will give them the flexibility they need.

11.30 am – I’m not quite back at the office so I dial into my conference call from the car. Fortunately I have found a coffee shop and a good signal. This is an internal conference call with two other partners in our human capital team on our tax strategy as a business and the forthcoming international tax conference with Baker Tilly International (our network of international partners) that we are hosting in September. It’s important we get the right clients there. I am keen to know what progress they have made with their plan and if I need to help, fortunately it’s going well.

12.15pm – Back at the office, time to say hi to my PA and get to grips with the morning’s emails which seem remarkably more in control since GDPR and the new email filter we have.

1pm – In-house lunch in the office with a bank we have mutual clients with. We want to get them on board with some planning we are doing for clients, so after a nice chat  my VAT partner and I give a short presentation on the opportunities. Hopefully they will have some clients they can introduce to us.

2.30pm – I’m out the door to Bedford station as I need to get the train into town for a management board meeting with the regional office chairman. It’s time for the board to share what we have as ongoing projects and listen to soundings from the partnership. I had thought about it yesterday but it’s a nice 40 mins on the train to myself to sit down and think about what needs to be discussed.

4pm – Then I have a management board chairman’s meeting at our London office. A good meeting, lots of great ideas shared and discussion around our five year business strategy, as well as partner behaviours and culture, something I’ve been championing and working on for a while now.

7pm – We all pop out for dinner to our usual restaurant around the corner from the office. I take 10 mins to FaceTime home, it’s only usually one night a week I don’t get to put our little boy to bed.

9.30pm – Train home

11pm – Bed, maybe no riding in the morning. It’s an office day tomorrow with a couple of clients seeing me there.