Freelancer accountants in Fortune Green — from £45/mo, fixed.

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.

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.

CIS deduction statements go missing constantly — contractors change, emails vanish. HMRC's records can fill some gaps, but the fastest refunds belong to subcontractors who keep every monthly statement. If you're in construction around Fortune Green, that one habit is worth real money.

Plenty of people incorporate too early because it "sounds established", then pay for accounts, confirmation statements and payroll they didn't need. The switch pays for itself at the right profit level — the trick is knowing yours.

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.

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 capital gains annual exempt amount has shrunk to £3,000, which pulls far more ordinary disposals — shares, crypto, second properties — into reporting territory. Gains that once fell under the allowance now need a return, even when the tax due is modest.

Since Section 24, individual landlords can't deduct mortgage interest as an expense — it's a 20% tax credit instead, which pushes some higher-rate landlords into surprising bills. Whether to hold property personally or through a company is now a genuine question with genuine trade-offs.