Small private companies with a year end of 30 June 2018 and into their second or later year of existence should submit their accounts to Companies House by Sunday 31 March January 2019 in order to avoid a Late Filing Penalty.
Archives for March 2019
Stamps for Direct Mailing
Postage rates rise on Monday March 25th 2019, so you might like to buy in a stock of stamps of the “non value indicator” type which will hold their relative value. We have done it already by ordering online from https://shop.royalmail.com/ which is currently offering free delivery on orders over £50.
It costs nothing extra to order a great variety of colourful stamps. We advocate that every business does a little bit of direct mailing, for example in its slack season. Our standard stamp for direct mailing is the grey-green second class “English country definitive” with the three lions. This is an attractive-looking stamp and it does not scream “second class” at the recipient. The same can be said of the nice blue second class Scottish country definitive.
For the other mail we send out, we use a variety of nice stamps and commemoratives and we can order in early March in order to stock up. We often get our own envelopes handed back to us with signed documents in them, so we cut off the used stamps and give them to charity. Everybody wins.
Employer Payment Summary by Tuesday 19 March 2019
It can happen sometimes that when you are an employer, you have not actually made any wage or salary payments for a PAYE month such as the month from 6 February to 5 March 2019. In that case you must submit electronically an Employer Payment Summary as a NIL return by Tuesday 19 March. This bureaucratic requirement is too easy to overlook.
If you engage a local accountant and business advisor or a payroll bureau to do your wages, then this will be taken care of. In our case we keep a diary and do a batch of payrolls at about the same time each month. Our payroll files are bright yellow like the old P30BC booklet so we do not overlook them. We colour-code all the taxes so green is VAT, red is income tax, blue is corporation tax and yellow is PAYE.
If you no longer want to have a payroll scheme, then you need to close it down in a formal way. You cannot just assume that you can stop sending in monthly returns.
MTD Specialists? Really?
We have started to claim to be Making Tax Digital Specialists. Back in 1999 David Porthouse devised a spreadsheet system for analysing bank statements by the page which was always right to the nearest penny, and since then he has advanced digital accounting to the point of having a working optical character recognition system for processing bank statements. It is possibly literally true that we were making tax digital when the taxman was wearing a nappy.
The area to watch is interaction with the online tax system. The corporation tax system is pretty good, and David has worked on nothing but companies for several years. However, the other taxes leave something to be desired, and we need checklists and written procedures to fill in the gaps, which we now have. It is always essential after submitting a tax return to make sure that the online view is what we expect it to be. This cannot be taken for granted, and if necessary we will telephone or write a letter (with a Certificate of Posting if needed) to sort things out.
CIS Returns to Tuesday 5 March 2019
Construction Industry Scheme returns for the month from 6 February to 5 March 2019 should be submitted online by Tuesday 19 March. This includes NIL returns.
It is only too easy to get caught out by the need to submit a NIL return when no payments to subcontractors have been made. If you engage a local accountant to do your CIS returns, then this will be taken care of. In our case we keep a diary and do a batch of work at about the same time each month. We aim to be the Carlisle accountants that businesses will turn to for a range of advice and services. Our payroll files are bright yellow so they are hard to overlook, and CIS files also have a green line around them so they are easy to pick out.
The Google Snippet is your Website’s Front Door
Our Google snippet should say “See an accountant and tax agent as soon as possible if you are starting a business in Carlisle.” which is a simple English sentence with a verb and a full stop even if viewed from a mobile phone. To influence Google to do what we want, we have made this sentence the lead sentence of our website’s front page, and we have also put this sentence in the Meta Description tag. Google will look at the joint correlation between the lead sentence and the description tag and infer what to put in the snippet.
Have a look at the source code of this page to see the description tag. Right click and select View page source. Note that all Google can ever do is to look at joint correlations for which it has plenty of computing power available. It cannot actually understand what it is doing in the human sense, so if we want to persuade Google to do things for us, we need to feed it with joint correlations. In the snippet sentence as provided here, we have made it a backlink to the entire website. Google will look at this in its efforts to work out what the website is about, and hopefully it will give us a better placement if somebody starting a business in Carlisle is looking for an accountant and tax agent.
It might look as if we have told our competitors how to keep up with us. Well, our compliments to those who do. Many of our competitors employ accountants who are cleverer than us, and computer programmers who are more able than us, but they don’t co-ordinate their efforts.
A Company which has missed the 28 February 2019 Deadline
If your company had a deadline of Thursday 28 February 2019 for the submission of its accounts to Companies House, and this deadline has been missed, then you still have something to play for, and you should contact Carlisle accountants such as David Porthouse and Co at once. You will incur a penalty of £150, but this penalty rises to £375 after Sunday 31 March 2019 if you still haven’t submitted your accounts. These penalties are £300 and £750 if you miss the deadline two years’ running. We can readily prepare and submit your accounts within the month if you contact us straight away.
Just stating the obvious, if you miss a deadline and incur a penalty, you still have the obligation of preparing and submitting accounts. That doesn’t go away and your penalty is just extra money you will need to pay.