I'm a partner with Burton Sweet, chartered accountants & business advisers, and run the Shepton Mallet office down in beautiful Somerset. Despite the name, Shepton Mallet is actually the home of Glastonbury Festival! I trained in audit and corporate tax with Grant Thornton and came to my current position in 1991 via small local practices and a stint with a training consortium.
I have the distinction of being one of the original members of the AccountingWEB editorial team, having been a freelance writer here for a year or so before John Stockdyk joined!
My recollection is that ownership of an asset if the requirement for FYAs, so an invoice or unconditional contract dated in the year is sufficient. WDAs on the other hand require an asset to have been "used" in the business, thankfully not an issue in this case but would be relevant for a non-electric car.
Not tried laser cartridges, always use HP original, but we have some Canon inkjets and the IJT branded ink cartridges seem to work fine. As others have commented, we have tried refilled cartridges on HP and Epson inkjet printers in the past and they seldom seem to work properly - or at all.
In the south west we have clients who have advised us that all of the banks, BAE and Thales have made a blanket decision. I assume many others have done the same.
I haven't done it with really huge volumes of transactions, but for smaller online stores using PayPal I download the statements from PayPal monthly in Excel, do all the data manipulation in Excel and then just post the totals to Xero. Very quick to do.
Who knows? is the short answer, but I know of accountants who have done this themselves and have never had any come-back from HMRC.
Artificially splitting 2 sole trades (eg husband & wife) or 1 sole trade+1 partnership are more easily shot down by HMRC. I think 2 companies is a harder target, but they remain a risk unless there's a very clear separation of the two operations.
I'm not entirely convinced by any of these arguments. Would any of the respondents like to quote references to the taxes act that back up their argument? I think we all have a vague idea of the issues here, but at the end of the day tax is law, and it's what he law says that counts (and not necessarily HMRC's interpretation of the law either).
For my part I would probably have treated all these expenses as allowable CPD, there's a very fine line between updating old knowledge and acquiring new -after all, if you knew it already why would you go on the course?
It's a similar argument to the capital vs repairs issue - clearly the asset will be better after the repair than it was before, but that doesn't make the expenditure capital.
My answers
My recollection is that ownership of an asset if the requirement for FYAs, so an invoice or unconditional contract dated in the year is sufficient. WDAs on the other hand require an asset to have been "used" in the business, thankfully not an issue in this case but would be relevant for a non-electric car.
This is a nice worked example that appears to answer the original question
Just no.
Not tried laser cartridges, always use HP original, but we have some Canon inkjets and the IJT branded ink cartridges seem to work fine. As others have commented, we have tried refilled cartridges on HP and Epson inkjet printers in the past and they seldom seem to work properly - or at all.
In the south west we have clients who have advised us that all of the banks, BAE and Thales have made a blanket decision. I assume many others have done the same.
Presumably they must because although an umbrella company is an intermediary it is excluded from the off payroll provisions.
I haven't done it with really huge volumes of transactions, but for smaller online stores using PayPal I download the statements from PayPal monthly in Excel, do all the data manipulation in Excel and then just post the totals to Xero. Very quick to do.
Useful discussion on medical expenses at https://www.taxation.co.uk/articles/2008/08/07/6660/medical-expenses including all the relevant cases on this area.
Who knows? is the short answer, but I know of accountants who have done this themselves and have never had any come-back from HMRC.
Artificially splitting 2 sole trades (eg husband & wife) or 1 sole trade+1 partnership are more easily shot down by HMRC. I think 2 companies is a harder target, but they remain a risk unless there's a very clear separation of the two operations.
Stick to the law
I'm not entirely convinced by any of these arguments. Would any of the respondents like to quote references to the taxes act that back up their argument? I think we all have a vague idea of the issues here, but at the end of the day tax is law, and it's what he law says that counts (and not necessarily HMRC's interpretation of the law either).
For my part I would probably have treated all these expenses as allowable CPD, there's a very fine line between updating old knowledge and acquiring new -after all, if you knew it already why would you go on the course?
It's a similar argument to the capital vs repairs issue - clearly the asset will be better after the repair than it was before, but that doesn't make the expenditure capital.