Annual company accounts successfully submitted to Companies House and corporation tax liability calculated. That was relatively easy. I decided not to use an accountant this year for my company accounts. I do all of my own book-keeping anyway into Sage Software. And even the ‘Instant Accounts’ edition is powerful enough to generate decent balance-sheet and profit and loss reports. It’s not like I have stock to account for, or loads of ’till rolls, just a handful of service invoices per month. The problem has been with the system used by my previous two accountants (and I only fully realised this by going through the process of preparing my own accounts); that my copy of Sage never had the full complete accounts. I would get journals to ‘fix-up’ the new year, but never had the correct journals pre running the end of year to calculate the likes of depreciation and corporation-tax liability. This time it was done right. It probably took me about half a day all in, saved between a fair wedge in accountant fees (no ‘accrued expense‘ in the accounts to that effect this year ha ha ha) and I’ll do it much faster next year!
OK, Note to self: Do ‘HMRC Company Tax Return’ BEFORE doing the ‘Companies House’ return, the latter is very much a subset of the former. The former was submitted this evening. Had to use HMRC to calculate my corporation tax (or buy more software) and it matched the value I already sent to Companies House yesterday (to the penny)… phew!