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.
Getting Tax Back from the Revenue
One effect of the Construction Industry Scheme for many businesses in the building trade is that they will pay too much tax during the year, and will need to claim a refund at the year end. Companies often have a loss to carry back to a previous year, and they may also claim a refund of corporation tax.
Companion Websites
We now have a couple of companion websites. One of these gives advice on bookkeeping systems, and the other lists upcoming deadlines.
Death Duties
Reading through the handouts of various election candidates, it would appear timely to remind accountants of the different types of death duty that may be encountered. Suppose a person dies and leaves ten million pounds to five children, who each receive £2,000,000. There are two types of death duty that may be charged.
How Does a Listed Company make a Loss?
Yet another big company listed on the Stock Exchange has reported a loss. Actually, there has been only a modest fall in trading profits, but this sets off a chain reaction. The premises that the company trades from are only worth the expected future revenues from the trade, and a fall in profitability implies a fall in expected future revenues and therefore a fall in the value of the premises. Often this fall in the value of the premises swamps everything else, and it looks as if the company has made a huge loss. This is what hits the headlines.
A Meritocratic Profession
It’s nice to see that PricewaterhouseCoopers, a large firm of accountants, have removed A Level grades as a minimum requirement of their recruitment process. This will enable them to recruit good accountants from non-traditional backgrounds, based upon merit rather than what school they went to. While I went to a private school myself, I think universities and employers should be free to look at their experience of recruitment and make adjustments for a wide variety of backgrounds. However, this should not be dictated to them by politicians who want to introduce rigid systems which would merely swing the pendulum across to the opposite silly extreme.
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