Services.
Accounts Preparation
Annual and statutory accounts
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If you’re a limited company director with high standards, who wants things done right, talk to us about support with preparing your accounts.
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As a director, it’s your responsibility to make sure shareholders, lenders and investors have access to up-to-date, accurate accounting information. It’s about building trust, giving people confidence and driving efficient decision-making.
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Your annual accounts should include a readout on profit-and-loss in the accounting period – basically, how your business is performing. They should also include clear information on its assets and liabilities, in the form of a balance sheet. It takes real attention to detail and obsessive double-checking to get these perfect but it’s worth it to win the trust of your stakeholders. And it can help you feel more on top of things, too, so you’re free to focus on more interesting stuff.
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Statutory accounts are something slightly different. They’re how you report on your company’s performance to the authorities and are a key part of the principles of transparency that govern business in the UK. You have to provide a final set of accounts to Companies House within nine months and a day of completing your accounting period. You’ve also got to send a copy of those accounts to HMRC along with your corporation tax return.
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How we prepare your accounts
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We’ll work with you throughout the year to make sure your accounts are in good shape and on track. Then, when the time comes to prepare final accounts, it’s about pulling everything together, checking, checking again and making sure the finished product is spot on.
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We’ll manage the final submission to HMRC and Companies House, including fielding any follow-up queries. Then we’ll let you know how much corporation tax you need to pay, or deal with as part of your business tax return.
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In fact, all this works best as part of a full service where we handle your company’s bookkeeping and management accounts, too – but we’re flexible.
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Because we’re a modern, forward-thinking accounting firm, we built technology into our processes from day one. In practice, that means using the amazing power of cloud accounting software such as QuickBooks and Sage to keep accurate records in real-time throughout the year.
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Worried about your accounts?
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Sometimes, people come to us because they’re worried about the state of their accounts and want to get them sorted. Maybe a previous accountant let them down, or perhaps they tried to manage it themselves and got overwhelmed.
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Either way, we don’t judge – we just want people to feel in control and take that weight off their minds.
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If your accounts are in a bit of a state and need some urgent attention, get in touch now and we’ll see what we can do.
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Bookkeeping
Dull for you? Essential for us.
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We love bookkeeping. It’s the bedrock of a good set of financial statements, for getting your KPIs right or having a clean bill of health for your VAT return, which is why we have enjoyed helping our clients with it for so long. In fact, some of our most successful relationships have been where clients have left the books to us.
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Bookkeeping is also time consuming, as well as maybe a little dull to most people. And whilst it may seem simple, there is still an underlying knowledge around double-entry, how the P&L and balance sheet works and accounting principles that means there is a lot to know. So it prompts the question – would you rather work through the bank statement on a Saturday morning trying to get it right, or rather be doing something fun with the family, or plotting how to take your business forward?
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Leave the books to us with our simple process.
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The advent of cloud accounting now means a remote bookkeeper is very easy to implement, with almost immediate results. You don’t need to invite them to your home and keep serving the tea anymore. We work on your books remotely and all that is needed from you is a little bit of input.
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The first thing we will do is make sure you are truly tech-ready. That is ensuring you are using an established cloud accounting platform (we use both Sage and QuickBooks), synced to your bank account. We then link this to ReceiptBank, which is a fantastic companion for the business owner and bookkeeper and scans, reads and publishes receipts direct to your accounting system. We will give you some very simple training, personalised credentials and set in place a simple process that means bookkeeping becomes a breeze.
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All you then need to do is send the receipts. Using ReceiptBank, that’s as easy as forwarding invoices to a dedicated email address or snapping a picture of your receipt with your phone. That then makes its way to us where we take care of the rest.
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How often we check in as well is completely up to you. For some, bookkeeping can be dealt with every month, whilst others who want the latest information might benefit from a weekly, or even daily update.
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You can feel at ease your records are being looked after and you’ll get your free time back. And to top it off, we’ll even give you a discount on other services such as VAT returns, accounts production and sole trader returns too, because we’ll have been looking after your records, we’ll be as confident as we can be with them.
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Still using paper and spreadsheets?
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If Cloud technology isn’t your thing yet, or you are still working off spreadsheets and paper, that’s no problem, get in touch. We’ll always encourage you down the digital route for the many benefits and time savings it offers.
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Corporation Tax Returns
What is corporation tax
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Accompanying your annual accounts, Directors have an obligation to file a company tax return, known as a CT600, to calculate and pay their corporation tax. The current rate of corporation tax is at 19% and is levied on the profits of your business and include gains made through trading, investments or selling assets.
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Unlike income tax, you have no tax free allowance with corporation tax and will be taxed for each £1 of taxable profit. However, you can reduce your tax through allowable deductions and expenses.
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If your business makes a loss, you can carry those losses across to offset against future (or previous) corporation tax profits.
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You will need to file your corporation tax return one year after your accounting period and settle any corporation tax due nine months and one day after the end of your accounting period.
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How can I reduce how much corporation tax I pay?
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Reducing your corporation tax is about reducing your taxable profits. This can come in many forms, such as paying yourself an increased salary (albeit this will incur additional income tax), increasing your pension contributions, making further investments into your business or exploring possible reliefs available, such as R&D or possible industry related tax reliefs.
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Another simple way to reduce the amount of tax is to ensure you are vigilant in expending as much as you can through your business, if it is for business purposes.
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How we look after your corporation tax
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Because corporation tax is linked to your company accounts and will require a set of full accounts to accompany any submission, we will always complete your corporation tax filing in conjunction with the production of your annual accounts. This means we will discuss your corporation tax at the same time we produce your accounts.
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We will take your accounts and work through each line and make adjustments accordingly in line with what is an allowable or disallowable expense and advise you of how we define your taxable profit.
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We will review any large (capital) purchases and ensure you are maximising your reliefs, such as your annual investment allowance, so as to ensure you recover the full corporation tax relief possible in the tax year.
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After you agree your tax return, we will manage and file any returns with HMRC and make the necessary entries in your accounting ledger on your behalf.
VAT
Requirements of VAT
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VAT is a complex tax and it doesn’t necessarily follow the same logic as other taxes, such as income tax.
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As a consequence, it’s important to get it right. A compliant VAT business needs to keep good records of VAT purchases, issue proper VAT invoices and pull all these inputs together in a MTD-compliant system for submission to HMRC.
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Keeping accurate records, such as VAT receipts is important to validate what you can recover VAT on and provide support if ever investigated. These must include the VAT number of the company you have bought from, the tax point (date of the invoice, usually), the net, VAT and gross amounts and details of the product or service. And equally, any invoices you issue should include the same information.
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How we prepare VAT returns
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We will make sure you are compliant to the highest standard when it comes to your VAT. We act with the highest amount of care and caution here, so you are watertight should HMRC pay a visit, reducing the risk of surcharges and VAT penalties. HMRC take kindly to the adoption of robust accounting software and the support of an accountant in the event of an investigation and we intend to give them no reason to think otherwise with our high-grade VAT return service.
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First, we will set you up with all the right tools to succeed, namely one of our preferred accountancy software packages and ReceiptBank, to ensure you are filing records effortlessly whilst meeting your obligations for compliance. Using cloud accounting software will also keep you MTD-compliant.
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We perform a transaction-by-transaction audit of your records and will highlight any discrepancies or gaps to resolve, such as missing documentation or incorrect VAT coding.
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We will then present a VAT return for your review, before filing to HMRC digitally and advising you as to how much to pay and when. All the while, we do more than simply file the VAT. We’ll constantly appraise whether you are on the right VAT schemes and if we think you could benefit from a change, we’ll let you know.
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If you want help with the record keeping, it might be worthwhile asking us to handle your bookkeeping. Beyond saving you time, it could save you money as we provide a discount for any VAT returns we file, if we’ve had a hand in producing the books.
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Registering for VAT
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We will always enquire with you as to whether it’s necessary or right to register for VAT first. Sometimes you are obliged to with the turnover threshold being met, however other times a voluntary registration may, or may not benefit you.
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Provided you have established a business, we can register you for VAT quickly and efficiently over the course of a meeting. The VAT registration process takes 30 minutes typically.
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We will work with you to ensure you are set up under the best schemes for your business and are aware of your obligations around VAT.
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We will monitor the registration until the point you have your VAT certificate. At this point, if you have engaged us to produce your VAT returns, we will also register for agent authority, which means we can discuss VAT matters about your business freely with HMRC, saving you the hold-times on the phone.
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Enabling MTD
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MTD was recently introduced and is a second phase of the registration process. You will need to ensure you have a fully-compliant software package that is MTD compliant. We will ensure your VAT account is linked up to your software so you are ready to digitally submit VAT returns. This process takes a little longer, towards a few days allowing for confirmations to be received.