Let’s say you are a company employing two people, each receiving a substantial salary. It may occur to you that if you split yourself up into two companies, each employing one person, then you can claim two lots of Employment Allowance. Why stop there? Why not have every employee with his or her own company?
Archives for May 2015
A Qualified Audit Report by a Qualified Auditor
Is this good or bad? Well, the word “qualified” means two different things in the title. The auditor is a specialist accountant who has to sit and pass a lot of exams, and have supervised professional training, and do continuing professional development, in order to be described as “qualified”. Having a qualified auditor is a good thing, one presumes, and an unqualified auditor is to be avoided. The unqualified auditor may have failed the exams or been struck off.
Change
If you are thinking of a career in accountancy, then one golden rule is to expect change. Sometimes it is good change, but only sometimes. Often it is good-ish change poorly implemented, like the Revenue’s online efforts. Sometimes it is mindless change for the sake of change, of which non-corporate distribution tax is a prime example. Sometimes it is actually bad change, like the two different sets of rules on capital gains tax for individuals and for companies. Always, though, it is going to be change.
VAT returns for the Quarter ended 30 April 2015
are due for submission by 7th June 2015. Any net VAT which is payable is due to be paid electronically by the same deadline date.
Company Accounts to 31st August 2014
The financial statements of private companies in their second and subsequent years of business with a year end of 31st August 2014 need to be submitted to Companies House by 31st May 2015. The corporation tax payment for a small company with the same year end needs to be made by 1st June 2015 in order to avoid Late Payment Interest.
P60s
should be given to all employees who were still on the payroll at 5th April 2015. The deadline to do this is May 31st, but it may help with good staff relations if this were done now. Some employees will need the P60 for mortgage or student loan applications.
New Students
should apply for their student loans and grants by May 30th 2015. If they apply after this date, they may find that things are not ready at the start of term.
Taxing the Multinationals
If I run a coffee shop where I make a standard profit per cup, and I face competition from another shop across the street which makes the same profit per cup, then I would expect both of us to be paying the same tax per cup. If it turns out that the other shop is part of a multinational chain which only pays tax when it feels like it, then I am entitled to put that down to the incompetence of our tax collectors. This does matter because money not paid in tax is available for reinvestment in a more attractive shop, better coffee-making machinery, and more staff training, so a lighter tax burden for a competitor is blatantly unfair.
Cumbrian Accountants have nice Websites
For various reasons, I have looked at many accountants’ websites over the last year or two. I have to say that there is a trend for accountants based in Cumbria to have nice-looking friendly websites compared to accountants outside the region. In fact, I might just be one of the laggards here. Keep it up!
Overnight Batch Processing
If you ask a computer to do a job, much of its resources are expended upon interacting with you rather than actually doing the job, and in the days when there was a shortage of computer power, this was an issue. The solution was to put your job in a queue and do it overnight along with a batch of similar jobs. This is called batch processing and it is more efficient than trying to serve everybody at once.