VAT is causing me a bit of a headache at the moment and brings me back to one of my biggest bugbears – the complexity of legislation that continues to affect our businesses and which still seems to grow day by day despite the promises of all the politicians.

One of my businesses falls under the classification of a “Tour Operator” for VAT purposes and hence we have a highly complex VAT accounting scheme to maintain, not charging VAT to our clients but having to account for VAT from the margin we make on certain of our supplies.

(more…)

A bit of a diversion today – taking a day out of the office to work with Young Enterprise delivering a business education programme called “Sell for Success” to year 9 students at a local school.

Essentially, the programme is a business simulation game which takes the students through the challenge of launching a new product including all the associated business issues of finance, marketing, design, teamwork and presentation all in one day. Each class has a business adviser to help them through the day and at the end of the day the team have to present in front of all their peers before awards are made.

(more…)

Monday morning – mental note to self – apply for a dispensation from HMRC for expense reporting.

6 July is fast approaching and the annual task of preparing P11D’s is upon us once again. Every year this circular paperchase between employer, HMRC and employee mystifies most of the MD’s with whom I work – reporting items where no benefit has arisen to the employee, who may even have paid the expenses on a company credit card, just so that he or she can include them on his tax return and claim a deduction so as not to suffer a tax charge.

(more…)

I read a headline last week that said that FDs are in danger of losing their strategic role and need to demand better training and staffing. This was the summary of a survey carried out by Ernst & Young that confirmed what we all know – our role has expanded, one of the main drivers being increased and more complex regulation and compliance requirements and there is an increased need for us, and our staff, to collaborate and work more effectively with the other primary business functions in particular sales and marketing.

(more…)

Spring brings a number of tasks for many FDs – year end accounts, payroll year end and maybe the annual audit. It is also a good time, however, to look at your archiving policy. All too often we adopt the approach of boxing everything up, cataloguing it and sending it off to archive never to be thought of again until the scheduled destruction date.

(more…)