21 February 2014
Small businesses are being urged to consider a scheme that allows them to be taxed on money that flows in and out of their business, rather than using full accounting rules.
The ‘cash basis’ scheme can be used by sole traders and other unincorporated businesses with an annual income of less than £79,000 to simplify their accounting processes, saving both time and money. Using the scheme involves a business simply working out the cash received in a tax year, less any money spent on allowable business expenses. This means small businesses won’t need to spend time at the end of the tax year making complex accounting adjustments, and other calculations designed for larger businesses. Many small businesses are likely to benefit from the simplicity of the cash basis, particularly those providing services, such as hairdressers, window cleaners, taxi drivers, gardeners, painters and decorators, plumbers and electricians. In addition, unincorporated businesses can choose to use ‘simplified expenses’. This involves using flat-rates, instead of making complex calculations of actual business expenses. It can be used for the following expenses:
business costs for vehicles; business use of your home; and private use of a business premises as a home.
HMRC has produced a short animation and a YouTube video to help small businesses decide if the schemes are right for them. Or they can watch one of HMRC’s webinars .
HMRC website outage
3 April 2014
Due to preparatory work for the transfer of HMRC website content to GOV.UK, HMRC’s website was down for a short period today.
HMRC issued a press statement regarding the outage earlier today:
HMRC is carrying out some preparatory work as part of our plans to transition content from the HMRC website to GOV.UK.
Unfortunately visitors to the HMRC website were automatically redirected to GOV.UK for a short period earlier today. This problem has now been resolved and HMRC apologises to any customers who were inconvenienced over this short period. The transition of HMRC content to GOV.UK will occur in phases over the coming months. We will announce further details of each phase of transition before we redirect customers to GOV.UK. You can read more about our approach to transition in previous blog posts on this blog, how we are prioritising the topics that will be transitioned in each phase, and the work we are doing to build a new system for the HMRC manuals .
Update on Joint Initiative on HMRC Service Delivery
16 April 2014
CIPP Policy News Journal
16/04/2014, Page 179 of 519
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