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 December 2019 to 5 January 2020. In that case you must submit electronically an Employer Payment Summary as a NIL return by Sunday 19 January. This bureaucratic requirement is too easy to overlook.

If you engage a local accountant and business adviser 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. The colour purple is used for forced loans to HMRC.

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.

 
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 November to 5 December 2019. In that case you must submit electronically an Employer Payment Summary as a NIL return by Thursday 19 December. 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.

 
Construction Industry Scheme returns for the month from 6 November to 5 December 2019 should be submitted online by Thursday 19 December. 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 accountants for small business that you 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.

 
Value Added Tax returns for the quarter ended 31 October 2019 should be submitted by Saturday 7 December 2019, and any payment which is due should be made electronically by the same date.