Construction Industry Scheme returns for the period from 6 June 2015 to 5 July 2015 should be submitted online by 19 July 2015. This includes NIL returns.
Archives for July 2015
First Quarter PAYE and CIS Payments
Employers must make First Quarter payments of PAYE and NICs by 19th July 2015 if settled by cheque. If you pay electronically, then you have until 22nd July to make the payment. Tax retained under the Construction Industry Scheme must also be paid by the same date.
The Inheritance Tax Threshold
George Osborne is planning to raise the inheritance tax threshold from £650,000 to £1,000,000 so a family home worth up to £1,000,000 can be inherited tax-free. In Cumbria, a house worth £1,000,000 is likely to be quite sizeable, but in the London area, it could still be a modest house. We could have a situation where a child lives at home caring for elderly parents, the parents die, and the child is then faced with a substantial inheritance tax bill on a house which is no mansion. It is as well to see the rules change to give some relief on this.
Excel as a Scrapbook
As an accountant, I use the Excel spreadsheet all the time. It may be timely to point out that it also makes a good scrapbook! I can copy and paste a photograph from the Internet, and then use Excel’s tools to crop and resize the photograph. It can be rotated and the brightness and contrast can be adjusted. Finally a coloured background can be added simply by filling all the cells with a selected background colour. Pictures of Pluto are currently getting this treatment, but you can do whatever you want.
Search Engine Proofing
Plenty has been written about search engine optimisation. Here we will comment on a related topic, namely keeping your website in a good position. The algorithms used by popular search engines can change by more than a hundred times a year, with the consequence that your placement can go up and down quite dramatically. We want to try to keep it up with some consistency. In the case of accountants in Carlisle, obviously we are the new boys, but our snippet says “come and look at our website and all the technology we use” in a way that other listings do not. We don’t mind being one or two places down the pecking order behind huge firms of accountants, but we do want a stable placement in the expectation of our snippet getting seen.