Monthly Archives: September 2021

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Reprieve for self-employed having to report tax quarterly

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By Timothy Adler on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

Millions of self-employed will not have to start reporting their tax income quarterly to the taxman from April 2023 as planned.

Bowing to pressure, ministers have postponed overhauling personal tax for the self-employed for another year, in what has been called the biggest shakeup in 25 years.

Making Tax Digital was scheduled to make 4.3m self-employed and small business owners keep digital records and report their income to HMRC every quarter rather than annually from April 2023.

Instead, the measures will now come into place in April 2024, the Government announced on Thursday.

Self-employed tax burden

Ministers have bowed to pressure after complaints that rolling out Making Tax Digital to any self-employed person earning over £10,000 a year would be another administrative burden coming on top of coronavirus and the shaky recovery.

“The government recognises the challenges faced by many UK businesses and their representatives as the country emerges from the pandemic over the past year,” Lucy Frazer, newly appointed financial secretary to the Treasury, said in a written ministerial statement.

HMRC is pushing for the self-employed to complete their tax returns every quarter to reduce the number of inaccuracies – either

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Why it’s important to create support networks

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By Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

From sporting champions to showbiz celebrities, not many days seem to pass just now without some public figure declaring that they’re taking time out to deal with their mental health issues.

If you’re fully engaged with getting your business going, you might be tempted to think that that’s a luxury you can’t afford, but Andrew Walsh believes that mental health is an issue that entrepreneurs need to take very seriously – starting with their own.

It can be lonely at the top of any business, particularly when you haven’t yet had time to build your teams, and it’s all too easy to pile pressure on yourself by thinking you need to know all the answers. Before that pressure becomes too intense, you need to make sure that you’ve got strong emotional support from your family and friends.

And you need to cultivate other networks too. It’s very easy to dismiss those invitations from your bankers or accountants to networking meetings, but just occasionally they can put you in touch with people who can provide reliable advice in areas from employment law and pensions to insurance – all those subjects

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How to protect your success

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By Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

At what point can you say that your business has made it? According to Andrew Walsh,the answer is never. As soon as you take your foot off the pedal, the danger is that you’ll slip back. You have to keep on ratcheting up.

Andrew believes that one of the hardest things for an entrepreneur is to be critical of their creation, but they need to take a regular look at every aspect of it with a detached, objective eye. They need to be their own troubleshooter, and identify two or three things that need to be fixed now. And when they’ve done that, they need to do it again and again.

And entrepreneurs should also be looking for continuous improvement in their own performance. One way he does that is by studying the biographies of leaders he admires in business and politics and identifying any features he can adopt as leader of AW Repair Group.

Andrew is also a firm believer in keeping a keen eye on the wider world, through trusted news channels like Bloomberg and Reuters. It’s a routine that has helped him detect emerging trends in

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Why you should become carbon neutral

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By Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

As a keen diver, Andrew Walsh has seen first-hand the damage that carbon emissions are causing to our oceans, and he’s committed to playing his part in the effort to reduce the devastation of the natural world before it’s too late.

As an entrepreneur, he’s also aware that there’s an increasing expectation on the part of customers, partners and investors that all businesses should prove that they’re doing everything in their power to minimise their impact on the environment.

Those are two of the reasons why AW Repair Group has committed to cutting its carbon footprint by 2 per cent year on year.

In partnership with an environmental consultancy, the Group has been through a thorough review of its activities: maximising the use of renewable energy sources, working with suppliers to minimise deliveries, specifying new equipment with variable speed or fuel saver modes, introducing a fleet of electric and hybrid courtesy cars, disposing of its waste responsibly and implementing efficiencies in every area of its operations.

>See also: 8 of the best electric cars for small business leasing

As a result, the whole AW network has now achieved carbon neutrality to

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What to do when facing financial adversity

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By Tracc on Small Business – Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs

It’s a rare small business that doesn’t go through some periods of financial adversity, whether it’s right at the start or as it begins to scale up. Andrew Walsh believes that entrepreneurs will be much better placed to deal with those difficult periods if they take the time to learn at least the basics of accounting.

In this case a little learning shouldn’t be a dangerous thing, because it will mean you’re exposed to far fewer of those nasty moments when your banker jabs a finger at your balance sheet and asks, “how are you going to fund this?”

You’ll still need to hire an accountant and a credit controller of course, unless you want to spend a lot of your precious time with your company’s books, but when you need to go to the bankers for a loan it’s a big help if you can speak their language.

It’s great if you can start up without any debt, but it’s important not to be underfunded. If you don’t have enough cash in a young business, you risk stunting its growth. If you do decide you need finance, check

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