Accountants in Elephant and Castle

The first hire brings PAYE registration, Real Time Information submissions every payday, workplace pension auto-enrolment and payslips that must be right. It's all completely manageable — as a monthly routine run by software, not a monthly crisis.

Most self-employed people under-claim. Use of home, mileage at HMRC's approved rates, phone and broadband apportionment, trade subscriptions, training that updates existing skills — legitimate deductions left on the table add up to real tax overpaid year after year.

Every tax bill is predictable months in advance — which makes tax the most plannable cost a business has. A separate tax savings account, fed a fixed percentage of every sale, converts January from a crisis into a transfer.

HMRC receives data directly from online platforms about sellers' income. If a side hustle has grown past the £1,000 trading allowance, coming forward first is always cheaper than being written to — penalties scale with how the disclosure starts.

The £90,000 VAT threshold is measured over any 12-month rolling window, so a strong few months can tip you over mid-year. There's a 30-day window to register once you cross it; miss that and HMRC can backdate the liability to when you should have registered.

If you contract through your own limited company, IR35 asks whether you'd be an employee without it. For medium and large clients, the status decision is theirs; for small clients, it's still yours — and getting it wrong in either direction costs money.

The July payment on account is the forgotten deadline: no return is due, but money often is. We diary it for every client it applies to, because HMRC charges interest from the day it's late even though nothing was "filed" late.

Crypto traders rack up hundreds of taxable events without noticing, because every swap counts as a disposal. Specialist software plus the pooling rules turns the mess into a number; guessing does not.