How to beat the tax deadline rush

If you pass an accountant’s office late in the evening or at the weekend in January, you may well see the lights on in their tax department! Why? They will be ensuring their clients meet the 31 January deadline for the submission of their tax returns.

Despite everyone’s best efforts, some clients miss the deadline because relevant information has not been obtained in time. Missing the deadline generally results in a £100 late filing penalty.

If you want to ensure that your return does not miss the January deadline there are a few simple things you can do to ensure there is plenty of time to complete and submit your return.

Help us to help you

We will be in a better position to prepare your self assessment return if we have all of the relevant information available. If we prepare your business accounts try to ensure that the relevant paperwork for your most recent year end is complete and set up and maintained in an organised manner. The following may improve the organisation of your records:

total and balance your books at regular intervals, as this will help you spot and correct any mistakes
analyse your payments and receipts so that information can be extracted easily
file your documents in a logical order to make it easy to find any one of them. For example, consider filing invoices in numerical, alphabetical or date order.

As soon as possible after the 5 April, start to collect together the paperwork needed to prepare your tax return. This might typically include details of:

income and expenses from employment (eg P60, P11D)
pension contributions paid
rent received and expenses paid, including income from overseas property
interest received (net and gross)
dividends, including vouchers
copy contract notes for purchase or sale of shares etc.

Where you do not have all of the documentation to hand, please either contact the relevant institution and request a copy, or ask us to do this for you... but please not on 30 January!

We look forward to seeing you as soon as possible with your information.

Budget latest

To the surprise of many, the Chancellor proposed to shorten the self assessment tax return filing deadline. Under the proposals online filing of self assessment returns would move forward from 31 January to 30 November from 2008. Paper returns would have to be completed by 30 September.

The reduction in the time available to gather information and prepare accounts would put increased pressure on both accountants and clients alike to meet the deadline and avoid any penalties.