Tax Services

Businesses + SMEs

Depending on your personal circumstances you may be required to complete a self-assessment tax return. We can help you work out whether you need to complete one in the first place. We will also take away some of the stress by completing the return for you. Provided we have the information in time, we will ensure it is completed before the filing deadline (31 January after the end of the tax year). We will also ensure that the return is completed correctly, reducing the risk of penalties arising from investigations by HM Revenue and Customs.

We will calculate the tax that is due and advise you of the tax payments that need to be made. As part of the process, we will also offer advice on how to minimise your tax liability.

A key element of running a company is dealing with the compliance aspects, the biggest is probably dealing with HM Revenue & Customs and Corporation Tax. The liability to tax is based on the rules governing Corporation Tax, which has rules on the expenses that you can set against your taxable income. We have a detailed knowledge of these rules and we ensure that you comply with them, whilst also ensuring you pay no more tax than is required. We recommend that we arrange a call or meeting during the year to advise you of your likely tax liability and consider whether any commercial business decisions made prior to the year can save you tax in that year.

These rules change from time to time, we will keep you up-to-date and help you consider the impact on your business of these changes.

HMRC tax investigations are very stressful, even if they are handled well. They can arise any time in the lifetime of your business or any year you file a self-assessment tax return. Even for the most trivial matter it can still be time consuming and costly in terms of the fees to pay, and whether or not there is any additional tax to pay as a result of the enquiry. This service provides you with protection from the professional fees that will arise, ensuring we can challenge the HMRC’s assertions and assumptions and you get a fair hearing.

If you are a small business that grows to a point where your turnover (sales) exceeds the VAT threshold (2020/21: £85,000) you will need to register for VAT and then submit returns on a regular basis. For a few years now there has been a need to submit the returns electronically (Making Tax Digital – MTD). One of the simplest ways is to keep your records is in Xero – call us for more information.

In some cases, it may also be beneficial to your business to register for VAT even if you are below the registration threshold. If your customers/clients are businesses that are registered for VAT themselves they will not worry about you charging them VAT. This is because, like these customers, if you are VAT registered you can claim back VAT suffered on your expenditure.

VAT is another area of tax that is complex and therefore confusing. If you are not sure whether you are completing VAT returns correctly or would just like us to review what you are doing give us a call and we can see if there’s anything we can do to help. Let us see whether one of the following common VAT schemes would help you:

• Flat Rate Scheme – you apply the appropriate percentage to your gross sales income and pay this amount across each quarter.
• Cash accounting – you only pay over the VAT when your customer/client has paid you, but can only claim back the VAT on expenses once they have been paid.
• Annual Accounting – you only submit one VAT return a year and make 10 payments each year, 9 based on the previous years liability and a final instalment to pay the balance.

There are other specialist margin and retail schemes for certain businesses sectors.

Care also needs to be taken where there are transactions involving commercial property.