David Porthouse & Co

Carlisle Accountants

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81 Larch Drive, Carlisle CA3 9FJ

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CIS Returns to 5 April 2018

 
Construction Industry Scheme returns for the month from 6 March to 5 April 2018 should be submitted online by 19 April. This includes NIL returns.

It is only too easy to forget 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.

A Company which has missed the 31 March 2018 Deadline

 
If your company had a deadline of 31 March 2018 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 30 April 2018 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 now.

The Cheque Run round about 26 March 2018

 
It is quite common to invoice a customer with terms of “30 days or net 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 February 2018 would be settled by 31 March 2018. 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 March listing all outstanding invoices. Typically the cheque run would be about the 25th of the month, or this March the 26th, the date of this posting. 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.

Auto Enrolment rates increase on 6 April 2018

 
Auto enrolment pension scheme contribution rates will increase in the week including 6 April 2018. Employers will need to contribute at least 2% of wages, and employees will need to make up the difference so total contributions are at least 5%. Employees will normally pay 3% and employers will normally pay 2%.

Contributions need to be increased for the full pay period which includes April 6, even if some of the period fell before April 6.

Rates will go up again next year to a total of 8% of wages. Obviously we are now talking serious money. The 1%-each rates that we have had up to now are just a pilot scheme to get people used to making pension contributions.

The End of the Income Tax year on April 5th 2018

 
The end of the income tax year on April 5th 2018 is approaching, and it may be timely to think about some tax planning.

Make ISA contributions if you have not done so already. Current interest rates are so low that it might seem not worth the bother, but ISAs might still serve as the first steps in setting up a private pension scheme for yourself while maintaining some liquidity.

If you are running a small company, then it may be a good idea to have a payroll scheme in existence and to be paying yourself a salary in order to make some use of your Personal Allowance. You may wish to vote yourself a dividend, at least up to the tax-free limit of 5,000 pounds per person. Discuss these topics with your accountant. We can produce dividend minutes and tax vouchers to assist you.

If you have a portfolio of shares, then you may wish to cash some in and to buy others, and at the same time make use of the Annual Exemption for Capital Gains Tax of 11,300 pounds. Again discuss this with your accountant.

Pleased with OCR

 
I am starting to feel pleased with my Optical Character Recognition system for scanning bank statements. I was given some bank statements which were computer print-outs from an online account. They were faint and in inverted order. The columns were switched around from the usual order.

The computer-assisted blink comparator was able to highlight at once what was obviously wrong, regardless of the order of the transactions. With the faintness of the statements, a few numbers were misread or were missing, and these needed to be overtyped by me to correct them. After this, I ran the computer routine again, and it was able to see the unusual order of the transactions and to add the right column headings.

Once the statements had been rectified on the spreadsheet, it was easy to read them into the main software. Overall the job took a bit longer than usual, but not excessively so, and I would certainly much prefer OCR to typing it in.