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10 top tips to help cope with a VAT Visit from HMRC

Although the days where regular, even annual HMRC VAT visits to businesses are seemingly long gone, in the past 12 months I have seen a steady increase in the amount of VAT enquiries being raised by HMRC, with a significant number of these enquiries arising from a VAT visit.

It is important to manage these visits in the best possible manner and the intention of this article is to give you some guidance around this in the form of the following 10 top tips:

Measuring the success of your business with financial KPIs

We see quite a varied approach by businesses when looking at how they measure their success. Different companies will take a different approach in terms of what they measure and the frequency with which they do it, but regardless of size, industry or where you are in your business life-cycle; there are some common Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) which all businesses should be measuring.

Richard Andrew Shortlisted for British Accountancy Awards’ Partner of the Year

Armstrong Watson Partner, Richard Andrew, has been announced as a finalist at the prestigious British Accountancy Awards held annually in London.

Richard – based at our Kendal office - is the only Cumbria based accountant to represent the category at the awards and will be up against competition from some of the country’s biggest names in accountancy. 

We can help you with your pensions said the caller!

I was intrigued and shocked over the week-end when a telephone caller said they wanted to help me sort out my pension affairs.  Thankfully I am up to speed with the pension legislation (ok automatic enrolment, final salary schemes and my own defined contribution scheme) but I know enough to know when I am receiving a bogus call.  The caller said they had all my pension pots information; another words my pensions from previous employments that I didn’t transfer into any one single pension.  So I calmly asked them to advise me of what I had.  To my surprise they did know the detail of two, wh

Another one bites the dust….

Is it deliberate non-compliance, ignorance or other reasons, some employers do not carry out “Right to Work” checks.  Thanks to the CIPP for sharing this latest non-compliance case, involving Mr.

RRI Team Facilitate Aardvark Clear Mine Sale to Menasat Gulf Group

Armstrong Watson LLP’s Restructuring Recovery and Insolvency team acting as Joint Administrators of Penman Engineering Holdings Limited - in Administration (the “Company”) have completed the sale of the Company’s 100% equity holding of Aardvark Holdings Limited incorporating Aardvark Clear Mine Ltd (“Aardvark”), the leading global humanitarian mine clearing machine manufacturer to Menasat Gulf Group PLC (“Menasat”). 

Making Tax Digital... delayed

The treasury have recently announced fundamental changes to their Making Tax Digital roll-out. Not only has the timetable changed, but the nature of the information required by HMRC has changed too. There are a number of areas which still require further clarification from HMRC, but here are three things that we do know:

10 tax saving tips for small business owners

Whilst we have an Office of Tax Simplification advising the government on how we might reduce the tax compliance burden on small businesses and individual taxpayers, we still live in a world where the tax code is huge, complex and difficult to interpret.

With that in mind, here are a few simple tips for small business owners to consider …

Use your allowances

The size, type and structure of your business will determine which parts of the tax legislation you need to consider in more detail, but everyone should be aware of the basics.

Time to swap business for the beach?

It is that time of year when most of us are thinking about taking a week or two out of our busy work schedules for a holiday.  Before you know it, it’s been and gone and that feeling of relaxing in the sun is diminished to a memory, until next year anyway.... 

Now could be the time to swap business for the beach!

5,4,3,2,1 now just do it.

I had the pleasure of being invited to a client’s summer party recently, during the evening we got on to the subject of business books and my client said that business books were just a waste of time and that they were all simply common business sense.

Now I guess to him this is very true, he runs a very successful business and is backed up by a great team so I suggested to him that is very much common sense to him because he uses a good amount of learned skills to run his business very successfully.