David Porthouse & Co

Carlisle Accountants

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81 Larch Drive, Carlisle CA3 9FJ

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.

Statements out on Wednesday 27 February 2019

 
If anybody owes you money, then today, which is Wednesday 27 February 2019, would be a good day to send them a statement to remind them of the fact. This is just a statement which you are entitled to send: it is not a threat.

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The Cheque Run round about Monday 25 February 2019

 
It is quite common to invoice a customer with terms of “30 days or nett monthly account”. Small customers will be expected to pay within 30 days, while large customers will be expected to pay at the end of the month following the month of the invoice, so an invoice sent in January 2019 would be settled by Thursday 28 February 2019.
 
Large companies do it this way because they may receive several invoices from a supplier, and will want to settle all of them with a single payment when they do their computerised cheque run. It would therefore be a good idea for the supplier to have sent a statement at the start of February listing all outstanding invoices. Typically the cheque run would be about the 25th of the month, which is a Monday this month. If you give credit and have debts to collect, then you might like to have a discussion with us. Most accountants are also general business advisors as well.
 
The “nett” in “nett monthly account” has “net” as an alternative spelling.

Irregular Printed Matter

 
Most of the printed matter we get is standard three-column A4-size bank statements for which we use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a flatbed scanner. We get the occasional credit card statement without any running total, and our own bank statements, which we receive once a month, happen to be in A5 format.

We could scan A5 format by rotating it before and after scanning, but this is quite a bit of faffing about. What we will do instead for both credit card statements and unusual bank statements is to scan them using an OCR pen scanner. Every February we will look on Amazon for the most recommended pen scanner, and try it out if it is different from last year. This year we have purchased a “Scanmarker” pen and it looks as if it will be able to do something useful. We will adapt our software to work with it.

Credit card statements and unusual bank statements we will collectively call “Irregular Printed Matter”. We don’t see that much of it, but it is nice to have a policy for dealing with it. At least we give the clerk more toys to play with, which takes the boredom out of accountancy.

Companies with a 31 May 2018 year end

 
Small private companies with a year end of 31 May 2018 and into their second or later year of existence should submit their accounts to Companies House by Thursday 28 February January 2019 in order to avoid a Late Filing Penalty.

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Direct Mail

 
Direct Mail means writing to prospective customers to tell them what your business has to offer. This may look expensive, but the costs of a direct mailing campaign are easy to control and the results are easy to monitor.

We suggest that many businesses might find it advantageous to do a bit of direct mailing during their slack season. The aim to to acquire some extra business and keep activity going when trade is falling due to the time of year.

Our slack season as accountants is February and March, and also the middle of every month between February and December. We will practise what we preach with a bit of direct mailing when we have little else to do. It will also put us in a better position to advise clients.

One thing we established this January is the sheer speed of our accounts production system, which often leaves us with nothing to do, so direct mail is something to fill in the time.