Accountants in Trostre Cottage

Auto-enrolment applies from the first eligible employee: assess, enrol, contribute, declare. The Pensions Regulator does check, and the fines for ignoring it are out of proportion to how simple compliance actually is.

Some businesses register for VAT before they must — reclaiming input VAT can be worth it if your customers are VAT-registered themselves. Others should stay below deliberately. It's a real decision with real numbers, not a formality.

HMRC runs nudge-letter campaigns to crypto holders based on exchange data. If there are undeclared gains in past years, a voluntary disclosure is dramatically cheaper than waiting for the letter — penalties are scaled to cooperation.

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.

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.

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.

Rental profits need reporting once they're more than trivial, and the rules differ for furnished holiday lets, rent-a-room and ordinary lets. Landlords are also in the first wave of Making Tax Digital — property income counts towards the £50,000 threshold.

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.