Our accountancy services

Self-assessment tax return is something we’ve helped our clients with for years. We bring a great deal of experience and expertise to our self-assessment tax returns, making sure to save you both time and money. We’ll save you hours and, sometimes, days of poring through the year’s receipts, invoices & bank statements, figuring out what needs to be put in, completing the return and sending it off to HMRC. We will advise what exactly you can claim as business expenses so you can offset them against your earnings, which tax schemes you can join and more!

To prepare your tax return we would need:

1) A list of all the expenses for your business, including those that are used for your business only partially. We will then work out what percentage of them you can claim back.

2) A list of all your product sales or fees charged to customers, including unpaid invoices.

3) Details of other taxed or untaxed income you received, for example, bank interest, PAYE income from a weekend or part-time job, capital gain or anything else that needs to be declared on your self-assessment tax return.

If you’re starting out on your own, then you may have thought of putting off your self-assessment until you start earning enough to get taxed on. However, HMRC requires you to prepare a tax return irrespective of whether you've made a profit or a loss. Any losses you incur (in case your expenses exceed your earnings) can be either offset against tax you paid through PAYE in the same year or offset against your business earnings in the following year.

If you wish to learn how to file your self-assessment tax return without professional help you are welcome to use our simple guidance here.

Every business has to prepare its financial statements (or annual accounts) at the end of each financial or tax year.  A company’s end of year accounts show how well the business has performed over a 12-month period. It must be prepared in accordance with the applicable reporting standards and Companies House guidelines.

Annual accounts will always contain a Profit & Loss Account (or an Income Statement) and a Balance Sheet. The Profit & Loss Account shows how much revenue (or income) the business generated during the year and what the costs were. The Balance Sheet shows what the business owns and what it owes to others. A company’s accounts may also include a Cash Flow Statement which shows how much cash was generated and used during any given time period.

One of the important requirements is that statutory accounts must represent a “true and fair view” of the company’s financial position which means that they are free from material inconsistencies that may mislead the users.

A company’s financial statements might have several types of users.

First of all, they are used by HMRC to ascertain how much tax the business owes. Therefore, a copy of annual accounts must accompany each year’s company tax return. Secondly, financial statements are used by owners and shareholders to guide important financial decisions.  Annual accounts are also going to be requested by any potential lender who considers advancing a loan to the business or its owner (for example, a mortgage broker). These are main users of the financial statements of a micro-business.  Larger corporations’ statements are likely to be accessed by managers, customers, suppliers, employees, the government, etc.

Companies House allows a micro-business (most solopreneurs' businesses are micro-businesses) to deliver annual accounts in a simplified format. Therefore, it might be tempting for a sole director to assume that it would be easy to prepare a set of accounts without professional help. However, in most instances, it would be rather challenging to prepare a set of compliant accounts, including a corporation tax return, for someone without any accounting knowledge, and for this reason we recommend to hire a licensed accountant to do this for you.

You and your business can receive fines for filing wrongly prepared paperwork or not doing it on time. You can also miss out on importance allowances and over-pay or under-pay tax. If you choose to trust us with your accounts preparation, we will make sure everything is done correctly and on time, and you won't pay more than you need to.

As a note, you have to prepare and file your annual accounts within 9 months of the accounting year end. Also, you must pay your corporation tax around the same time. That means it would be best to send us all your documents for accounts and tax preparation well before this 9-month deadline so that you can plan your finances more efficiently and avoid any late filing or late payment penalty.

If you're self-employed or a one-man company owner you would have to register your business for VAT only when your 12-month turnover reaches £85,000. However, if you're in an industry where your services are considered more seriously and it's possible you can gain a big contract or sale only if you are VAT registered, you may choose to register voluntarily, even your turnover is still below the registration threshold. Another reason for registering for VAT earlier is when you have lots of suppliers' invoices for which you can claim a VAT refund.

If you get in touch with us, we can monitor your finances, let you know when it's best to register (and which schemes to register for) or de-register for VAT. That way, not only will we make sure you're always compliant with HMRC rules, but also save you money whenever possible! With regards to VAT, every business is unique, can fall under different subsets of rules and needs its own, tailored service. We make sure that we do our best for your finances.

We prepare your VAT returns as part of our accounting service. We can either use your own bookkeeping to tailor your return, or collect all of your financial paperwork and create it from scratch, making sure that it’s thorough, correct & compliant, as well as always being sent on time, as part of our standard service.

We take great care to make sure we avoid common problems and pitfalls with VAT returns and correctly account for less obvious financial transactions including employees' expenses, goods & services for partial business use, bad customer debts (when a customer hasn’t paid an outstanding invoice), sales discounts and goods & services for export.

If you own a micro business or SME and need to pay salaries to yourself and  your employees, you will save much needed time and unnecessary worries by handing over the payroll service to a professional payroll agency or accountant. An accountant will always be on top of any inevitable changes to HMRC legislation, so you’ll never fall afoul of being non-compliant with payroll reporting regulations. This also means you reduce the risk of any PAYE penalties and arrears. Your payroll will be compliant with Real Time Information requirements and your data will be secure.

Another benefit is that you won’t need to pay for additional software to deal with payroll on top of all your other software expenses. We’ll calculate your employee’s income tax and NI contributions as well as make adjustments for sickness, paternity & maternity leave. We will also sort out special payment events such as furlough and anything else that might come along! 

We will advise your monthly PAYE bill payable to HMRC and create P45 forms for your employees when they leave your workplace. We will e-mail electronic payslips and produce end of year P60s for you and your employees and send those out either over e-mail or in paper form. Lastly, we can help you and your employees by taking care of employees’ expenses and benefits, making sure they are handled appropriately and taxed correctly.