Accountants in Woodham Mortimer

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.

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.

If you're a sole trader or landlord anywhere near the £50,000 income mark, Making Tax Digital will change your filing rhythm from 2026: four digital updates a year plus a final declaration. Clients who move their records to software early find the transition a non-event.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If your last Self Assessment bill was over £1,000, HMRC usually asks for next year's tax in advance — half on 31 January, half on 31 July. It's the number-one cause of "why is my bill double?" calls, and it's manageable: if your income has dropped, the payments can be reduced with a claim.