Accountants in Trewirgie, West

People stay with the wrong accountant for years because switching feels disruptive. In practice the profession has a standard handover process — clearance letters, copies of prior returns and working papers — and the new firm drives it, not you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Limited companies in CIS reclaim differently to sole traders — through payroll or the company tax return rather than Self Assessment. Plenty of construction companies sit on refundable deductions without realising; a quick review of the CIS position often pays for itself immediately.