Locum accountants in Croydon Town Centre — from £69/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 best salary-dividend mix moves with each year's thresholds and your other income. Setting it once in April — rather than guessing through the year — is one of the simplest pieces of planning a director can do.

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.

Miss 31 January and the £100 fine is automatic; three months later daily penalties start. If you're behind on a return, the maths almost always favours filing quickly over waiting — penalties grow on a timetable, and HMRC charges interest either way.

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.

MTD for Income Tax starts with the £50,000+ income group in April 2026, with lower bands following. Quarterly digital updates sound worse than they are — with software doing the bookkeeping, the quarters largely take care of themselves.

Most self-employed people under-claim. Use of home, mileage at HMRC's approved rates, phone and broadband apportionment, trade subscriptions, training that updates existing skills — legitimate deductions left on the table add up to real tax overpaid year after year.