OK, so, the headline is more than a little flippant. But stick with me.

Here's a story in The Cambridge Evening News that owes a great deal to clever PR spin.

In essence, the story indicates that "... AAT students trained on the job straight from school can be as much as £70,000 ahead of their graduate counterparts by the time they have completed their degree...".

The implication, of course, is that the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) training programme will give you a significant advantage over university educated accountants.

The truth is rather more prosaic. It is absolutely obvious and of no surprise to anyone that if you go out to work after leaving school you will be earning more money that someone who stays in full-time education.

Still good on the AAT for making it clear that university isn't the only route to a decent career.

Those of you reading this who run your own business may have elected to let your accountants take care of your payroll.

The thing is...well, accountants don't really like doing fiddly little jobs like payroll. In fact, even their non-chartered bookkeeping staff could be doing more 'worthwhile' work.

And, so it is quite common to find that your accountants have outsourced your payroll to a third-party payroll bureau.

Nothing wrong with that in theory. Except that you might find that directly engaging a payroll bureau is cheaper and more effective than using your accountants.

Our own work with payroll bureaus (bureaux ?) tells us that they will take on businesses of all sizes, even if you only have two or three employees.

It's worth taking a look and comparing payroll services over at our Just Accountants website : http://www.justaccountants.co.uk/payroll.html