Talha Sohail — ACCA-qualified accountant, Bury

I'm Talha Sohail, an ACCA-qualified accountant from Bury, Greater Manchester. I qualified through the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), one of the world's leading professional accountancy bodies, and I'm a current member in good standing — you can check my listing on ACCA's public member directory. My background is the bread and butter of good accounting: company and personal accounts, and tax returns — the work that keeps individuals and small businesses on the right side of HMRC and Companies House, explained without drama or jargon.

Why this site exists

Tax and accounts are written about badly, on the whole. Official guidance is thorough but dense; a lot of what's online is either salesmanship dressed up as advice or scaremongering dressed up as caution. Somewhere in the middle is what most people actually need: a clear explanation of how the rules work, which deadlines genuinely matter, and what to do about them — the way a good accountant would explain it across a table, not the way a compliance department would write it.

That's what I write here. Short, practical notes in plain English, aimed at the self-employed, landlords and small company directors — not at other accountants, and not as a pitch for work. This site is educational: a place to understand a rule or a deadline properly, not a shopfront.

How I think about the profession

Accountancy is a trust profession, and I hold my own writing to that standard: figures that are right, claims that are defensible, and plain speaking throughout. If something is good news, I'll say so; if something needs fixing, I'll say that too, along with what to actually do about it. I'd rather under-claim and over-deliver than the other way round, which is a fairly unfashionable position for anything published on the internet but the only one I'm interested in holding.

Where else I write

Alongside this site, I write and answer questions on the same topics elsewhere, usually adapting rather than repeating the same piece. My longer notes also appear on Medium and on my Substack, I post shorter updates on X, I answer real questions on UK tax on Quora, and there's a short profile on about.me. All of them link back here, and this site — talhasohail.co.uk — is the one place I'd point someone who wanted the full picture.

Bury and Greater Manchester

My professional association is with Bury and the wider Greater Manchester area, and where it's relevant I write with that region in mind — local tax questions, small businesses in the area, and so on. It's a genuine connection, not a keyword.

What you won't find here

No invented case studies, no client testimonials, no "as featured in" logos borrowed from somewhere else. If a piece here doesn't have a source I'd stand behind — GOV.UK, HMRC guidance, or ACCA's own published material — I'd rather leave it out than pad it. The same goes for numbers: where a figure or threshold could plausibly have changed since I wrote it, I say so and point you to check the current position rather than presenting stale detail as gospel.