Why Finding the Right Accountant is So Important For Your Small Business in London, UK

Why Finding the Right Accountant is So Important For Your Small Business in London, UK

 

How much do you know about accountants for small businesses in London? If you are a small business owner in London, and you don’t know why it is necessary to include an experienced accountant or a bookkeeper in your team, then it is the time when you need to seriously take a hard look at why you should. It’s not all about daily bookkeeping and taxes, but an experienced accountant can help you start, grow and keep your business thriving through the years. Let’s take a look at how they benefit your business at every stage.

Accountants During Start-up

So, you are planning to start your own business. What can go wrong? Every year, millions of people across the globe dream to become a successful entrepreneur but very few succeeded. The only difference between the successful start-ups and the one that fails just out of the gate is good advice and guidance. When you hire an accountant at the same time you’re setting up your company, chances are good you’ll get off on the right foot. An experienced accountant can;

  • Help with the financial planning and creating a financial outlook to help with funding and loans
  • Offer you the advice and guidance when summarizing a business model and plan
  • Advise on business setup and structure
  • Assistance with obtaining business licenses
  • Early set up of expense tracking and bookkeeping basics

Accountants and Day-to-Day Operations

Accountants are not only for big companies to take care of tasks like financial planning, tax filing and budget creation. They are very much useful to start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses. It is incredibly rewarding to have one in your team for the daily operation of your business. An experienced bookkeeper will ensure that all your books are maintained up-to-date and recorded properly, while an accountant can work with your bookkeeper to make sense of all of that financial information. Moreover, here’s are some more tasks they can manage, and they are;

  • Month-end accounting
  • Financial statements
  • Ensure compliance with government regulations
  • Oversee and manage payroll for your employees and contractors
  • Find cost savings when working with vendors and suppliers
  • Manage tax preparation year-round, not just at tax time
  • Create financial reports and summaries
  • Assist with budget creation and management
  • Contract oversight and administration
  • Asset and inventory tracking

Accountants When Business Is Flourishing

With a lot of hard work and a little push from the luck, finally, your business gets off the ground quickly and starts to flourish. Along with sweat and good fortune, the growth of your company depends on many other factors as well. You need some truly dependable individuals behind you who can help you steer the situations in the right directions.

It’s your business; hence, you are undoubtedly the expert when it comes to your product or service, however, you might not be an expert when it comes to the services a good accountant can provide. For instance, they can help in many ways such as;

  1. Perform cash flow analysis to help with decisions regarding growth
  2. Create reliable financial forecasting to help guide those decisions
  3. Guide you to manage growth responsibly and plan accordingly
  4. Recognize possible opportunities you can take advantage of
  5. Help make appropriate and well-informed choices when investing in equipment, inventory, and overhead
  6. Help you with industry pricing to keep you profitable and competitive

You can try, but wearing all the hats at a time is not possible and not in favour of your business. Having a professional advice is always beneficial for your business, especially when it is in the initial stage. An accountant can help you with all the start-up decisions along with paperwork. Moreover, they can also keep the things humming along during your daily operations. Most importantly, during the lulls of business, an accountant can help keep you afloat by keeping finances under control, helping manage expenses, and negotiate interest rates that can help get you through the hard times.

Meet the Best Accountants in London only at ob体育首页下载安装

If you are in search of an experienced, professional and dependable accountant in London who can stand by you 24*7, then you are at the right place. At ob体育首页下载安装, we have the accountants who can fit any business domain and any budget.

To find the right accountant for your business, look no further than ob体育首页下载安装. For a free quote and consultation, get in touch with our experts in London today at +44 020 8903 2077 or schedule an online appointment at https://www.affinityassociates.com/contact-us/ .

Important Tax Tips for Small Businesses in the UK

Important Tax Tips for Small Businesses in the UK

Maintaining a business is an overwhelming task for most business proprietors. This is particularly valid for small business owners. Small businesses need to deal with inventory management, promotions, deals, marketing, bookkeeping and accounting, among numerous different business errands. Presently, with such a significant number of things to deal with, small businesses may tend to forget something as vital as, taxes. Also, a slip-up like this can truly cost enormous! Regardless of whether small business proprietors know about the significance of recording tax returns and tending to different taxes apropos, they still be facing issues in carrying out such exercises.

So if you are a business owner in the UK, and are facing in keeping up with your accounts or taxes, then you should continue reading as we present you some of the most important tax tips, which could best match the requirements for small businesses.

Tax Planning: It is Essential

A productive tax arranging is essential for small businesses who need to guarantee that their tax risk is at a minimum level. By maintaining a low tax bill, businesses can avail smooth cash flow. This further leads to better business expansion and growth.

Making a successful arrangement for tax risk isn’t excessively troublesome. You simply need to discover and comprehend what tax commitments your business has and what alternatives you need to address them. Examine them regularly, and you will do fine in regards to your business tax undertakings.

Stay Organized with Your Financial Records

Up-to-date financial records help demonstrate the genuine picture of taxes and funds. Thus, staying up with the latest is important. You might surmise, that you are running only a small business and don’t need to invest in keeping your financial records organized. In any case, remember that for the most part there are a lot of transactions occurring in an average small business consistently. Not recording one or a couple of transactions will give you an inaccurate summary of your business accounts. This can later affect your business severely and may even welcome HMRC examination. Hence, keeping your business’s financial records organized is vital. Doing appropriate bookkeeping is one approach to guarantee that everything is well organized and up-to-date.

Safeguard the Tax Records

Numerous business proprietors commit this error – dumping the tax records of the earlier years in places where they won’t meddle with their everyday business exercises. This is not at all advisable. As a matter of fact, even the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) suggests keeping the records for no less than 22 months . Keeping the old tax records helps in readiness of the most recent tax returns, planning of budgetary articulations, tracking expenses, and checking the progress of your business in addition to other things.

Hire a Small Business Tax Accountant

In spite of being sufficiently cautious, there are situations when tax issues can emerge. Such issues could be exceptionally intricate for common business alone to manage and resolve alone. This is where an expert small business tax accountant can help. A professional tax accountant for small business can enable you to get ready to file tax returns, will give you expert tax advices that reduces your tax risk, and do proper measures so the business avoid raising any tax issues. For a small fee, an expert small business tax accountant can help keep your business accounts up-to-date.

If you are a small business owner based in the UK and are, looking for a skilled and professional small business tax accountancy firm than ob体育首页下载安装 is the right place for you to contact. ob体育首页下载安装 is one of the leading accountancy firms based in London, UK, and is boasted with a pool of professional and certified accountants and tax experts.

Visit https://www.affinityassociates.com/ to know more.

Domicile and Tax

Domicile and Tax

Domicile and tax

Correctly establishing your ‘domicile’ can have a big impact on your UK tax bill, especially if you have foreign income, foreign capital gains or a potential exposure to Inheritance Tax (IHT).

Domicile is a complex issue because it is not actually defined in our tax laws; it is a legal concept as to which country’s rules an individual is to be subject to, in terms of factors like marriage, divorce and inheritance/intestacy rules. Your domicile can be different from both your nationality/citizenship and residency.

 

Domicile of origin

Everyone has a domicile and you can only have one domicile at a time. The starting point is to look at your “domicile of origin” which you acquire at birth. This is usually your father’s domicile, but in cases where your parents were not married at the time of your birth, you will take on your mother’s domicile. It is therefore important to find out as much as possible about your family background and whether your parents had or have any overseas connections. Domicile can be a major consideration if you are making a disclosure to HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) of previously undeclared offshore income/ gains, such as under the Liechtenstein Disclosure Facility. Your domicile status may never have previously been looked at and, more importantly, no claim may ever have been submitted to HMRC.

 

Domicile of dependence

Changes to your domicile status can happen through changes in your parents’ domiciles whilst you are a child (under 16), through marriage (before 1974) or if your intentions change.

 

Domicile of choice 

If you have a non-UK domicile of origin, then in order to acquire a UK domicile as an adult, you must have both:

a physical presence in the UK and

an intention to remain here indefinitely, but not necessarily permanently.

Income tax and capital gains tax

An individual who is both UK tax resident and UK domiciled is subject to tax on their worldwide income and capital gains on the arising basis. This means they are taxed on the income/gains as and when they receive them.

For individuals who are UK resident but non-domiciled, they can choose whether to use the arising basis or whether to use the remittance basis for their non-UK income/gains. The remittance basis permits them to only pay tax in the UK on their overseas income/gains when the funds are “remitted” or brought in to the UK. There is a wide definition of what constitutes a remittance and tracking remittances does need careful attention, so specialist advice should always be sought.

Individuals who have been long-term residents of the UK (for at least seven tax years from the past nine) are subject to an annual charge of at least £30,000 if they wish to continue to use the remittance basis; they can of course choose to switch to the arising basis if it is not worth paying the charge.

 

Inheritance tax

The other primary consideration of being non-domiciled relates to Inheritance Tax. Most people will be aware that IHT is charged on the value of possessions owned at the date of death which cumulatively exceed the threshold of £325,000. However, it can also apply to gifts made during a person’s lifetime, especially if the gifts were made in the seven years prior to the date of death.

A UK domiciled individual is liable to IHT on their worldwide assets, whereas a non-domiciled individual only pays IHT on their UK-based assets.

If you have been UK resident for at least 17 tax years, you will be deemed to be UK domiciled although this rule only applies for IHT purposes and there are some countries to which this rule cannot apply.

Until 5 April 2013, there was an IHT lifetime limit of £55,000 on the amounts that could pass from a domiciled spouse to a non-domiciled spouse. As of 6 April 2013, there are elections which can be made to mitigate this issue.

 

Further reading from Affintiy:

Inheritance Tax

 

Further information can be obtained from the HMRC website using the link below:

http://abytx.co/16ar553

Losses brought forward from 01/04/2017

Losses brought forward from 01/04/2017

This applies to Companies

Losses carried forward from 01/04/2017 can be set off against not just trading income, but any other income that the company derives.

However there is a 50% restriction where companies and or groups are carrying forward losses exceeding £5m.

Capital losses are still ring-fenced so that these can only be relived against future capital gains.

Below link gives much more comprehensive information.

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/525929/FINAL_PDF_3.pdf

Further reading from Affinity:

Capital Gains Tax

Ten Common Tax Elections and Claims

Ten Common Tax Elections and Claims

We came across this informative Ten Common Tax Elections and Claims  explaining how to make claims under 10 common tax elections.  There’s a lot to take in, but we’ve pulled out 3 of the most relevant with links to the necessary forms.

 

1.  Form 17 (Declaration of beneficial interests in joint property & income)

Income and gains from jointly owned properties are usually taxed equally on spouses (or civil partners) regardless of the actual ownership of the property. However, completion and submission of this form specifies a different apportionment for tax purposes,  which is based on actual proportion of ownership. This can be useful where owners are subject to different rates of income tax.

2.  Capital losses set off against income tax s131 ITA 2007

Under this section a taxpayer may be able to reduce his income tax liability by making a claim to offset losses on disposal of shares acquired by subscription in a qualifying trading company (or following a negligible value claim for such shares) against other income in the current or previous year.

3. Holdover relief claim S165 TCGA and S260 TCGA

Hold-over relief is available under  s165 TCGA 1992 . There is small print however, such as, the gift must be of ‘business assets’. Also, the transferor and the transferee must claim jointly within five years from transfer.

The time limit for claiming gift hold-over relief is five years and 10 months from the end of the tax year of disposal. Hold-over relief is also available under  s 260 TCGA 1994  where the disposal is a chargeable transfer for inheritance tax purposes, but not a potentially exempt transfer. Cases where there is no liability to inheritance tax, because the value transferred is within the zero-rate band, qualify for hold-over relief.

 

Related reading from Affinity:

Tax Returns

Capital Gains Tax

 

 

The Link below covers the various subjects as indicated underneath the link

http://accainpractice.newsweaver.co.uk/accainpractice/1nrf181jrnliai8yh9d3oh?a=6&p=48314203&t=28218204