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Business groups want more support to help employers meet the Chancellor’s pledge to raise the national living wage to £10.50 an hour by 2024. Chancellor Sajid Javid announced his intention to implement the hike alongside lowering the age threshold for those who qualify for the living wage from 25 to 21. The national living wage… Continue reading Employers need help to absorb the planned national living wage hike

The Treasury’s take from stamp duty land tax fell by the largest amount since the start of 2008/09, government figures show. In England and Northern Ireland, HMRC collected £11.94 billion in stamp duty receipts on completed property or land purchases in 2018/19 – a 7% decline on the previous tax year. That represents the biggest… Continue reading Stamp duty revenue down for HMRC

Plans to remove the employment allowance for large employers from April 2020 could impact on smaller firms. This allowance provides employers with a reduction to their national insurance contributions (NICs) bill of up to £3,000. Employers that claim the allowance can carry it forward from one tax year to the next, but that will stop… Continue reading Small employers risk losing the employment allowance in 2020

Key considerations for contractors before April 2020. Large and medium-sized organisations have just six months left to prepare for changes to off-payroll working rules, which are due to extend to the private sector next spring.  From 6 April 2020, firms that engage private-sector contractors will be responsible for deciding if the rules should apply and… Continue reading IR35 in the private sector

Further tweaks to the apprenticeship levy look certain to be made in the autumn, when new chancellor Savid Javid is expected to deliver his first Budget. In his final Budget speech in October 2018, former chancellor Philip Hammond halved the amount small firms taking on apprentices had to pay from 10% to 5%. But Javid… Continue reading Javid ‘to broaden the apprenticeship levy into a wider skills levy’

Some of the UK’s biggest retailers have come together to demand action is taken to revamp the business rates system. Business leaders from more than 50 companies wrote to chancellor Sajid Javid to ask for four changes. These include reforming transitional relief, which limits how much a bill can change following revalution. The letter also… Continue reading Retailers unite in call for business rates solution

Avoiding waste, maximising profit. Accountants, as a breed, are fans of efficiency. We tend to appreciate optimised systems and abhor waste, whether it’s time, effort or resources being frittered away. The concept of efficiency as we know it today is a product of the industrial revolution. That’s when engineers and manufacturers became obsessed with squeezing… Continue reading Identifying inefficiencies in a business

Outstanding invoices compromise your business’s cashflow. When you supply goods and services, you expect to be paid, and promptly, but Britain has a deeply embedded culture of late payments. Indeed, for some businesses, delaying payment is an essential part of the business model. Outstanding payments are problematic for various reasons. First, there’s the basic problem… Continue reading The scourge of late payments

The business rates system has become “uneconomical” and “unsustainable”, and should be reviewed, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) has said. Business rates are a tax on most properties used for business purposes, and are calculated based on an estimate of the property’s open market rental value. The CBI argues that long gaps between rate… Continue reading CBI: ‘Unsustainable’ business rates system in need of reform