Accountants in Skips Corner

UK residential property sales have their own regime: report and pay within 60 days of completion, separately from Self Assessment. Other gains report annually. Mixing up the two timetables is a common and expensive mistake.

Register with HMRC by the 5 October after your first tax year of trading, open a separate business account, and put a fixed slice of every payment aside for tax. Do those three things and your first January will be boring — the good kind.

Compliance checks are usually specific: one return, one figure, one question. Answered promptly and with evidence, most close quickly. The expensive enquiries are the ones that started as unanswered letters.

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.

The honest answer changes with your profits. At lower profits, sole trader simplicity usually wins; as profits grow, a limited company's mix of salary and dividends, corporation tax rates and liability protection starts earning its extra admin. We run the actual numbers before recommending either.

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 tax-free dividend allowance is down to £500, so almost any director taking dividends now pays some dividend tax — and needs a Self Assessment return to report it. The classic small-salary-plus-dividends strategy still works; it just needs actual planning rather than folklore.

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.