Newsletter Archives - much of this remains as
relevant today as ever, for example:
From Autumn 2000:
Mine, all mine!
Whether in business or not, it is worth recording the source
of any monies received which are not income.
Typical examples are personal insurance pay-outs, refunds of
personal expenses, gifts and personal loans repaid to you.
If the Inspector of Taxes asked to look at your bank
statements for the last six years in search of unrecorded income, would you be
able to explain all the odd bits and pieces of money received?
From Summer 2002:
Beware of the latest scam
The latest sales scam to hit
town goes something like this:- You get a call from a company claiming to be
screening applicants for web-site addresses. They tell you that someone has
applied to register your-business-name.xyz and the caller is concerned that
they may be planning to set up a web-site in your name and rip off your
business.
The
good news is, though, that as the owner of your-business-name, they are giving
you the opportunity to prevent the other person from registering it.
Jolly
decent of them to warn you, you may think. But then
comes the crunch – you can only stop the others by registering it first…
You’ve got the picture by now.
If you
have not registered your-business-name.co.uk or your-business-name.com by now,
do so if you can. If you have a limited company, only you can register
your-company-name.ltd.uk.
However, as more suffixes (ie the .com bit) are ‘released’, the permutations
appear to be endless – if .com and .co.uk are already registered, ask yourself
whether someone will find them instead of you when they look for your site –
consider developing a new name altogether or a variation on your name, as some
of the big companies have done.
From Xmas 2002 (the only change being that the VAT
threshold has since risen to £73,000):
Some VAT myths
·
“VAT only applies to people who sell
things – I’m ‘labour-only’, so it’s not a real business and doesn’t count.”
Even if
you supply labour-only, (unless you are an employee) if your turnover exceeds
the threshold (currently £55,000pa.) you must register.
·
“I can wait until my accounts are done,
then worry about registering if they show the turnover is more than £55k.”
This could
generate a hefty penalty - you must monitor your sales on a monthly basis, so
that you know when any consecutive 12 month period has exceeded the
threshold. You then have to register by the end of the next month.
·
“There are two of us in the business, so
we can do twice as much turnover before registering.”
The
threshold applies to the business – if it’s a partnership then it must be VAT
registered if the partnership turnover exceeds the limit of £55k.
·
“Travel expenses reclaimed are not subject
to VAT so can be ignored.”
If your
customer reimburses your expenses, this is part of your turnover. Therefore,
these count when working out whether you need to register and, if registered,
you must charge VAT on them, even if they are (eg) rail tickets which carried
no VAT when you paid for them.
