What Your Accountant Needs To Know

As a business owner, it is crucial that your accountant has all the appropriate records, this allows them to efficiently execute their profession and legally minimise your tax bill! Do you need to know what information your accountant requires to handle your finances? Below is a checklist of documents you should share with your accountant, following this list will significantly help your accountant prepare your accounts and tax returns; Accounts records; You will need to send over ALL your bank statements for your business or businesses. This means statements for the whole period! Including statements from all relevant accounts too.
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Top Tips for First-Time Freelancers

Lots of us dream of being self-employed and taking the plunge to pursue the journey is an exciting moment in a lot of people’s lives. However, it does have a downside. Dealing with regulations and rules surrounding self-employment can be tricky. Whether your business is a single-staffed company or a larger business, it’s vital that you know what you need to do to stay above board. Here are some of the most common questions we get asked and the information you need to answer them: When should I register with HMRC? As soon as your business starts operating and trading
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Saving An Emergency Fund

One of the most sensible things you can do financially is to build up an emergency fund. You never know what life could throw at you. A huge number of factors could mean you find yourself short on the cash front. We’d recommend having, at the very least, 3 months worth of expenses saved. The fact that an unexpected event will lead to you needed the money we’d also recommend keeping it in an account that you can access at all times without needing to give notice when you withdraw. How much are you able to save? So now you know
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Top Tips For Negotiating Salaries With New Employees

From the moment you offer a job to the successful candidate the window for salary negotiation opens. There are two outcomes of this negotiation, that the candidate will end up feeling either wanted or devalued. In their eyes, the level of pay they receive determines how important they are to you and your company. A successful salary negotiation will end in a positive employer as well as a positive employee. Reasoning has been discussed and both parties will agree upon a fair salary that reflects both the employer and employee. If you’re struggling to negotiate or are looking for some guidance
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What You Need To Know About Directors Loan Accounts

Most business owners first learn about Directors Loan Accounts is when they’re sat with their accountants to discuss their Ltd Company year-end accounts. It’s not something that is always discussed. If you’re unsure about them and need a little more information, hopefully, this article will answer some of your questions. Directors Loan Account Simplified Put simply, a Directors Loan Account is a record of how much money your limited company owes you or that you owe your company. It shows the amount left for you to withdraw free of tax from your company, or if you’ll need to reimburse if
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What You Need To Know About VAT on Ecommerce Sales

For most products, there’s no difference between online and physical retailing where VAT is concerned. However, digital goods and services (ebooks, music and image files etc) come under a different set of VAT rules. The way that HMRC look upon it is that if you’re selling goods on the Internet, you’re using it solely as a tool for communication and distribution as well as receiving payment from the customers buying your products. The same rule applies as it would for a physical store, you are only able to charge VAT if your business is registered to do so. Should your eCommerce
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How Leaders Can Make Better Business Decisions

As a leader in a business, you’ll be faced with decisions every day. Whether they’re small decisions that don’t make much of an impact or larger scales decisions that could change things massively for the company and those working for it. It can be daunting and the sense of responsibility on you often gets overwhelming. There’s no clear set way to make a great decision, it all depends on the situation, those involved and the implications of each possible outcome. We have developed a quick list of things that we suggest taking on board when it comes to making your
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The Basics For The Self-Employed

Being self-employed can often mean the line between business and personal finance gets blurred. It’s hard to create a divide and have a firm barrier between them both. Our expert team have come together to deliver you our most useful tips for managing your finances. Create a Budget When you’re self-employed it means you’ve not got a guaranteed income that you can rely on being around the same amount each month. This can make budgeting trickier. Creating a budget for expenses allows you to have a clear idea of where your money is going and where you could save some
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The Gender Pay Gap: What The Companies Getting It Right Are Doing

In April 2018 all UK companies who employed 250 or more employees had to publish statistics revealing their gender pay gap. This movement saw a flurry of headlines highlighting companies with large pay gaps and what they should do to narrow them. Initially, more than ¾ of businesses were paying their male members of staff more than female employees. Some of the worst perpetrators had a gender pay gap of over 80%. Some of the biggest companies in the UK showed that their gap was over 3 times higher than the national average. At the time this was 18.4% for
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The Struggle For Millennials With Personal Finance

Research indicates that those from the millennial generation aren’t as financially literate as those from previous generations. They are however more likely to use the latest financial technology. The millennial generation is perhaps most famous for being technological. By 2025, the workforce will be made up primarily (75%) of millennials. The issue is that the millennial generation is showing signs of struggling to understand the most basic financial language. Could it be the job of accountants to aid them in understanding finances and in turn manage them more effectively? “Only 8% of millennials demonstrate high financial literacy” Lack of understanding
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