September « 2017 « Accountants Sheffield | Martin Milner & Co

Archive for September, 2017

VAT bad debt relief

Tuesday, September 5th, 2017

If you use standard VAT accounting – pay VAT on sales when invoiced and claim back VAT on purchases when invoiced – you may have availed yourself of the six months claim for bad debt relief on unpaid invoices. This would have allowed you to claw back VAT paid to HMRC on invoices that are more than six months old and still unpaid.

This is a welcome relief, as it returns to your bank account VAT you have paid to HMRC, but never received from your customer.

Unfortunately, this is not the whole story.

As indicated above, you will also need to take a careful look, prior to completing your periodic VAT return, to see if there are old invoices in dispute on your purchase ledger – invoices that you receive from suppliers. If they are more than six months old you will have to pay any VAT input tax you have previously claimed back to HMRC.

Accordingly, vetting your sales and purchases in this way should be part of the process you undertake before submitting a VAT return.

An alternative approach to VAT accounting may be available to you. If your turnover, before VAT, is £1.35 million or less, you could change to the VAT cash accounting scheme. Using this scheme, you will only pay output VAT, or claim back input tax, when payment is received from a customer or paid to a supplier. This generally works best if your business is consistently owed more from its customers than it owes to suppliers.

Please call if you would like more information about the VAT special schemes, or help more generally with completing your VAT returns.

Common misconceptions about tax and letting property

Tuesday, September 5th, 2017

HMRC has published a list of popular misconceptions that taxpayers have about letting property. We have listed below a summary of situations where you will need to declare rental earnings to HMRC:

  • If you inherit property and let it out.
  • If you buy a property as an investment and let it out.
  • Divorcing partners, who decide to let out their jointly owned property, will need to declare their share of any rental profits on their individual tax returns.
  • You may move to a new house due to employment considerations and let out the house you are moving from.
  • You may move into a care home and let out your present home to help pay for the fees.
  • You may buy a property for your son or daughter to use while at university, and they may sub-let to friends on an informal basis and charge a nominal rent, which you use to defray costs. Any surplus monies received from this sort of arrangement will still need to be declared.
  • Moving to tied accommodation can create problems if you keep your existing home and let it out. If the rents you receive cover your mortgage repayments (capital and interest) you may consider that you have not made a profit, but the capital part of your mortgage repayments are not an allowable deduction for income tax purposes.

Also, watch out for the effects of the changes to the rules for repairs and finance costs (interest) that we have covered in recent issues.

If you are concerned that you may be required to declare your rental income, and you have not yet done so, we can help. There is a tried and tested process to bring matters up-to-date. Please call for more information.

Beware self employed contributions trap

Tuesday, September 5th, 2017

To qualify for the full, new State Pension you will need to have 35 years of contributions. At present, the self-employed pay Class 2 (a fixed weekly amount of £2.85) and Class 4 contributions (9% of profits between £8,164 and £45,000, and 2% of profits over £45,000), but only the Class 2 payments contribute towards your 35 years.

From April 2018, Class 2 contributions are being abolished.

It is likely that from April 2018, if you are self-employed and earn more than the small profits limit (SPL), currently £6,025 for 2017-18, but less than the current lower profits limit (LPL), £8,164 for 2017-18), you will not have to pay Class 4 NIC but you will still receive credits towards your new State Pension entitlement.

Thus far good news for the lower paid self-employed.

Unfortunately, the news is not quite so good if you earn less than the SPL threshold. Up to April 2018, you could top up your State Pension contributions by making Class 2 contributions, at £2.85 per week. From April 2018, you would need to make Class 3 voluntary contributions, and these are currently £14.25 a week.

The annual cost of protecting your State Pension rights would therefore increase from £148.20 to £741.

Self-employed with income below the SPL may be able to achieve the same result if they are claiming other benefits: for example, tax credits, child benefit or Universal Credit. If this is the case they would not need to pay the Class 3 contributions and would still receive credits towards their State Pension entitlement.