What we do
Whether you are a business or an individual needing accountancy support, we are here to help you. Our commercially intelligent team of accountants, tax advisers, business experts and auditors are committed to enhancing the value of your business and will always go the extra mile to help you optimise its true potential.
Of course, we always work hard to ensure your business is fully compliant and your annual accounts and tax returns are completed accurately and promptly, but our remit is far broader than that — we’re here to help you grow. And we’ll go out of our way to ensure we do everything possible to help instil growth and potential in your business through effective tax saving strategies, accountancy support and business performance management advice.
Supporting you through the lifecycle of your business
In times of uncertainty or when your organisation is undergoing a restructuring programme, we can offer reliable, trustworthy and exceptional business consultancy and support to empower your decisions. For clients who are approaching retirement and want support to develop a strategically sound exit strategy, our team can work with you to ensure you achieve the best outcome.
If you’re starting a new business, you will find our new business start—up advice invaluable too. We can help you establish firm foundations that will allow your business to grow and help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls. Click here to download our FREE Business Start—Up guide.
Our Business Solutions include:
- Consultancy support designed to enable your business to grow and prosper
- New business start-up — invaluable support for success hungry companies
- Funding & Finance — capitalise on our expertise to secure the funding you need
- Business planning — strategic, intelligence led support for controlled and sustainable growth
- Management control - measuring & monitoring the financial performance of your business is vital to its development and success
- Tax saving - effective strategies to optimise your wealth & protect your assets
- Compliance - including accounts preparation, company reporting, tax returns and calculations, company secretarial, bookkeeping, management accounts, payroll
Personal Accounting Solutions
When you work with Jacobs Allen, you can look forward to receiving the best independent advice that’s right for you and your family. Managing your personal affairs can be time consuming and complicated. Our specialist team of Personal Accounting experts has been created to help you maximise your wealth and assets efficiently and with absolute confidence.
Our friendly and approachable team is committed to putting your interests first and providing invaluable support to those closest to you. Working with absolute discretion, we can offer impartial advice relating to estate planning, trusts and personal tax planning for capital and income.
Our personal accounting solutions include:
- Personal accountancy support
- Estate Planning
- Financial Management
- Personal Tax Planning
- Trusts and Inheritance Planning
- Tax credit assistance
Routine work
Of course, everyone in business has to produce some form of accounts; the responsibility rests with you to satisfy the requirements of HM Revenue & Customs (The Revenue) primarily and also in certain circumstances Companies House and other Regulatory Authorities specific to your industry or profession.
Other business related routine tax work involves dealing with PAYE for employees, the Construction Industry Scheme (CIS) for contractors and subcontractors, and VAT on sales and purchases. All of these are administrative systems of tax collection, imposed on businesses by government, where your failure to comply with regulations can be costly in terms of penalties and cashflow.
Many individuals and trusts also have a responsibility to submit technically complete and correct Self—assessment Tax Returns to The Revenue, even when they are not in business.
The Issues for you
- How do you ensure all of this work is done correctly without opening yourself up to potential problems, yet take advantage of all the available reliefs and tax saving opportunities?
- If you use an accountant or tax adviser, how do you decide which one will be right for you and how can you be sure they really know what they are doing and are able to give the right advice – after all, isn’t one ‘accountant’ much like another?
- What will it cost, because it won’t save you any money will it?
Our Solution and the Benefits to you
Much of this routine compliance work is a burden and we can help to alleviate that burden by taking it over from you and shouldering the responsibility for ensuring the accounts and returns are technically correct and comply with all regulatory requirements.
The extent to which you feel comfortable that someone else is handling all of these routine matters will have an impact on your freedom to concentrate on running your business or focussing on other financial matters and that should allow you to grow your wealth more effectively.
We can’t say, as some others would have you believe, that this will always “save you tax”, though in certain circumstances it will. Part of our standard service is to review all accounts and returns to ensure that we identify opportunities for helping to increase your wealth or save tax and act upon them.
We also seek to identify opportunities that will enhance your cashflow, again reducing part of your burden of making sure you have enough cash to meet your ongoing needs.
Additionally, you can choose to have management information clearly presented with the accounts to enable you to focus on those areas of your business that will give you most benefit.
You can get on with running your business and your life to meet your goals without having to worry about what needs to be done and when to meet your regulatory responsibilities.
And as long as you provide us with the information we ask for in good time, you will have no penalties to pay.
There will be a cash cost for you and how much that is will depend upon what work is outside your ‘comfort zone’ that you decide we are to undertake. You can be assured we will charge fairly and you have a choice of billing either based upon the time we spend or as a fixed fee arrangement if that is what you prefer. Either way, we try to achieve a balance of work that you are comfortable with, so that we are not charging you for work that you are able and willing to undertake.
Accounts
The size and complexity of your business and the use of a Limited Company or Limited Liability Partnership will determine the nature of the accounts you will need to produce each year.
Typically, an unincorporated business does not have to produce accounts in a statutory format, whereas Limited Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships do have specific accounting formats laid down by the Companies Act and Limited Liability Partnerships Act. Accounting standards apply universally to all accounts as they dictate the principles that underpin accounting concepts. However, smaller entities have a measure of relaxation in the application of accounting standards, to the extent that they meet certain size criteria.
Very small unincorporated businesses have to prepare only a simple income and expenditure account, though still based upon certain accounting principles to satisfy the requirements of HM Revenue & Customs.
The degree to which accounts have to comply with legislative and accounting standards will of course influence the technical complexity of these accounts and therefore the amount of work that is involved in their production.
We ensure that all accounts that we produce for our clients meet the regulatory and legislative requirements, but that they do not exceed them. In this way, we ensure that our clients' responsibilities are met but that they are not paying for more technical work than is necessary.
We can work to produce final accounts from a range of types and qualities of records; from the most proficiently kept computerised accounting system to a box of incomplete receipts and bank statements. Clearly, these represent the extremes and most client records fall somewhere in the middle. What is evident is that the more efficiently kept, consistently analysed and reconciled records allow us to spend less time in producing whatever type of accounts are required; it therefore costs you less.
Bookkeeping
If you are too busy with your business, or if financial record-keeping simply isn't something you understand or want to be involved in, and when you are required to do so when operating through a Limited Company or Limited Liability Partnership, we can assist by doing bookkeeping work to ensure you meet your regulatory responsibilities of keeping proper records. Usually this is done using either Sage 50 Accounts or an Excel spreadsheet template. If you only need some guidance in setting up your bookkeeping system, we can help there too, indicating whatever system is likely to work best for you and doing as much or as little as you like in setting it up.
Audit
Limited Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships above a certain size are required by law to have an audit each year. This is an independent, risk based examination of the company's accounts, records, systems and management control, culminating in a report to the company's shareholders of the findings from that examination. We are Registered Auditors and are authorised by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales to carry out this type of work.
For us, this starts by ensuring we have a thorough understanding of your business so that we can assess the risks inherent within it and those that arise from the form of systems and controls you use to manage the business. In this way we can efficiently organise the work we have to do to validate that the accounts show a true and fair view of the business and so that we do not undertake work that is not immediately relevant to forming our conclusions on which we report.
All of this is designed to perform an efficient yet effective audit, at least cost to your business, but with conclusions upon which you can rely.
Whilst the audit work is not targeted at discovering fraud or other irregularities, where we identify when carrying out the work that there might be potential issues of lack of control or opportunities exist to improve the systems you use, we report those separately so that you can focus on those areas to make your business more secure and efficient. We therefore see it as being a positive process from which you benefit by having a regular opportunity for an external review of how the business is performing and where potential improvements can be made.
Personal Tax Returns
Everyone who is self-employed or in partnership, or who has income that is not taxed at source is required to complete a tax return each year, in a form set out by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC). There are rules about what income is to be reported and what expenses are allowable to set against that income, as well as whether any relief can be obtained on capital expenditure. Different types of income have different rules applying to them. All income is aggregated and a calculation of the tax payable is made to determine the total tax liability for the year. How and when this is paid is determined again by legislation and there can be significant cashflow differences from taking different options that are available.
Similarly, where you dispose of a capital asset, including your home in certain circumstances, you should consider whether there is a requirement to complete such a return either to calculate any tax payable or to claim a loss that might have arisen.
Again, there are rules about what relief may be obtained for losses, either capital or income, and how these might sometimes interact to your benefit.
Timing for submitting your tax returns and paying your tax to HMRC is critical, with different deadlines imposed dependent upon the method of submission; paper forms or online via the internet. Penalties and surcharges are payable where these deadlines are not met.
Knowledge of the plethora of legislation and regulations affecting your tax position, and how to use them to your benefit is a fundamental prerequisite to minimising your tax liability legitimately. Part of the professional qualification process and the continuing professional training that all of our team undertakes ensures they have a thorough working knowledge of the relevance of UK tax legislation, so they can help you to achieve both accurate completion of the returns and also pay the minimum tax possible.
We also undertake a pre-year-end tax planning review to ensure you are aware and take advantage of available reliefs that are relevant to your circumstances, again to reduce your tax liability.
Company Tax Returns
For each accounting period your company needs to complete and submit a tax return giving details of profits and other income sources and capital transactions. The legislative rules dictating the income and deductible expenses are different in many respects to those relating to personal tax returns and different time limits pertain to claims, submission of returns and payment of tax. There is also interaction between the treatment for corporation tax and personal tax for various payments made to owner managers of companies.
It is therefore critical that you are aware of the relevance of these issues and we ensure that this is dealt with as part of our service in dealing with the company's tax affairs at a compliance level. We do this in consultation with you to achieve the minimum overall tax payable by both the company and the owner managers personally, but recognising potential restrictions arising from the practical issues such as business mileage recording and cash availability for dividend payments.
Other returns might be relevant with the annual tax return or during the year, where for example the company pays interest to an owner manager as part of a tax efficient profit extraction policy, or where shares or options are given to employees. All of these are taken care of as part of our company tax compliance service.
Company Secretarial
Limited Companies and Limited Liability Partnerships are required to submit accounts and an annual return to Companies House each year, and also need to submit details of many other events such as a change of director or issue of further share capital when they occur. We can take care of all these regulatory matters for you and ensure full compliance with company law.
Payroll
When you employ people, you have responsibilities to apply the PAYE and National Insurance (NI) regulations to any pay and benefits that you give to remunerate your employees. It is important first of all to ensure that you determine correctly the status of anyone who does work for you, either as a contractor or employee, as different conditions will apply to how they are treated for tax purposes.
In deciding how much PAYE and NI to deduct from their pay and how much employers NI you also need to pay, you will need to calculate these amounts each pay period and pay these amounts to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) each month (or for certain small employers each quarter).
Your employees need to be given a payslip each pay period and annual returns need to be made to HMRC, summarising the PAYE and NI payable for the year. Similarly where you have provided benefits in kind, you need to calculate and account for the value of all of those benefits and for each employee complete an annual declaration of benefits (Form P11D), a copy of which is also to be sent to HMRC with a summary of the additional NI you pay as the employer based on the value of those benefits.
We operate a payroll service that takes this administrative burden from you in whole or in part and we can discuss to what extent you are able to deal with these matters and where you need some assistance.
VAT
Businesses registered for VAT must submit VAT returns, usually every quarter but sometimes monthly, showing amounts of Output VAT they have charged and collected on sales and Input VAT they have paid on purchased goods and services. Determining the correct VAT status of each transaction can sometimes be tricky, particularly when land and buildings are involved or the business involves the making of some VAT exempt supplies. We can produce VAT returns for you, either as an extension to our bookkeeping services or where you wish us to review your existing records and use those as the basis for the returns. Where you wish to produce these returns yourself, we are still available to advise on specific transactions or technical matters that impact on the correctness of the returns.
Equally, it is important to review the method of accounting for VAT to maximise the benefit to your cashflow and to check whether a specific VAT Scheme might give you some advantage. We can do that as part of an overall VAT compliance service or as a separate piece of work if you require.
You can be assured that you keep fully compliant and have paid the correct amount of VAT so that your cashflow is up to date and you are not liable for any penalties or VAT assessments for getting it wrong.
