The threshold to register for Value Added Tax remains unchanged at £85,000, with £83,000 being the threshold to deregister.
The Income Tax Year Ends Today, Friday 5 April
The income tax year ends today, which is Lady Day (The Annunciation) in the Julian calendar which was in use prior to 1750 and is still in use in some parts of the world and by the Orthodox Church.
The new tax year starts tomorrow. If you wish to claim a tax refund, then get your records together and let us have them.
If your tax bill at the end of July is larger than you think it should be, then again get your records together, give them to us, and we will get your tax return submitted before July so the payment can be reduced.
Making Tax Digital
From 1st April 2019, businesses which submit VAT returns will be expected to keep digital records. At the moment, all our VAT clients can be said to keep digital records since we were very early enthusiasts for MTD anyway. However, there will be an additional requirement to be able to turn these records into a standard format readable by the Revenue which needs to be considered.
In practice, MTD will hit us round about 1st June as VAT returns need to be actually submitted, and we have made an inventory of our clients to ascertain cutoff between the old system and the new.
Frankly, the Revenue’s general MTD efforts are just a joke. I cannot go onto the Revenue’s website and look up a client’s P60 or their CIS deduction history. I could do that in the “backward” Irish Republic where CIS is known as Relevant Contract Tax. What’s going on?
Value Added Tax deadline on 7 April 2019
Value Added Tax returns for the quarter ended 28 February 2019 should be submitted by 7 April 2019, and any payment which is due should be made electronically by the same date.
The Income Tax Year ends on 5 April 2019 : Actions for Businesses
If you expect that you will claim a tax refund based upon your tax return for the year ended 5 April 2019, then you could plan to get your accounts prepared and your tax return submitted as soon as possible after April 6th. Start collecting your records together now.
Being registered under the Construction Industry Scheme may lead to a claim for a tax refund. Make sure that you have all Statements of Payment and Deduction. These Statements are valuable documents in themselves, and it would be a good idea to make photocopies of them.
You might also want to submit a tax return fairly quickly after April 6th in order to reduce the instalment of tax payable on July 31st.
Auto-enrolment pension contribution rates will increase after 6 April 2019. The new rates are 5% from employees and 3% from employers, making a total of 8%.
The Income Tax Year ends on 5 April 2019 : Actions for Individuals
Make all the pension contributions that you wish to make by the April 5th deadline. This will be the lower of £40,000 and your earnings for the tax year, but subject to a lifetime allowance of £1,030,000. These rules are over-complicated if the Government actually wants people to save for a pension and not throw themselves upon the State in retirement.
Put up to £20,000 in an Individual Savings Account (ISA) by April 5th. Use it or lose it.
If you own a portfolio of shares, you might deliberately sell a few in order to crystallise a gain which is below the Annual Exemption of £11,700. There are rules to anticipate you buying them back the next day. Your accountant can advise you here.
The Income Tax Year ends on 5 April 2019 : Actions for Companies
Directors of small companies could have a payroll scheme set up so that they can pay themselves a salary and make use of their Personal Allowances for the income tax year 2018/19. There is just enough time to do this if you get on with it now!
Directors of small companies can vote themselves a tax-free dividend of up to £2,000 per shareholder. We can provide the paperwork, and they should do this as an exercise just to keep themselves familiar with dividends and how they work.
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.
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.
Value Added Tax deadline on 7 March 2019
Value Added Tax returns for the quarter ended 31 January 2019 should be submitted by 7 March 2019, and any payment which is due should be made electronically by the same date.
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