Services

If you earn over £1,000 from miscellaneous work in a tax year (that has not been taxed as employed earnings under PAYE), you are required to register as self-employed with HMRC. This can be done via this link:

Register for and file your Self Assessment tax return

The Musicians’ Union provides an introductory starting point to the types of expenses that musicians may be able to claim:

Musicians’ Union: Claiming Expenses as a self-employed musician

It depends on your circumstances as to what can or can’t be claimed so this should not be relied upon without consulting an accountant or tax advisor.

Jane will produce your accounts and tax return on a fixed fee basis. We are happy to advise on record keeping, use of spreadsheets, app and/or cloud software to save you significant time, and discuss the full range of expenses that you may be entitled to claim. We will submit your tax return to HMRC and deal with all routine queries and correspondence arising with them. We also regularly deal with accounts and tax returns for rental properties, investment income and capital gains.

Our fixed fee quote will depend upon your requirements, income and record keeping, covering any combination of:

• Self-employed or partnership accounts
• Employed income
• Pension income
• Rental income
• Investment income
• Capital gains tax on disposals
• Pension contribution tax relief
• Foreign tax relief
• Creative averaging relief
• Any other income to be declared or reliefs to which you may be entitled.

Amati UK will form your company, discuss your responsibilities as director and shareholder, and teach you everything that you need to keep your finger on the financial pulse of your business. We will produce your year end statutory company accounts on a fixed fee basis and file them with Companies House. We are can prepare interim management accounts and assist with in-house accountancy functions, dealing with the more complicated day to day issues that can trouble your bookkeeper.

Amati UK will also prepare your statutory corporation tax return and tax computation and file it with HMRC, and deal with related correspondence. We can assist with Company Secretarial filings and the full range of services to keep your business compliant such as VAT registration and opening a PAYE payroll (see below).

We prepare VAT registrations, VAT returns and VAT de-registrations, to meet your requirements. If you are selling to other VAT-registered businesses, it may be best to register from VAT when you first start your business. If your customers are end-users that cannot reclaim VAT, you may wish to put off registering for as long as possible. We can help provide ways of monitoring your income and verify when you cross the VAT registration threshold and need to register.

We can advise and help you set up software to ensure your VAT returns are filed in compliance with Making Tax Digital (MTD) rules.

We also can prepare and submit OSS returns, required for declaring VAT on digital services supplied to EU customers.

We are authorised with HMRC to prepare and submit monthly payrolls in compliance with RTI rules, and advise you of PAYE to pay to HMRC and issue your annual P60. We can prepare P11ds as required to declare benefits in kind.

We usually price bookkeeping into your inclusive fixed fee, depending on how and when you plan to keep and supply us with your information. Any one-off bookkeeping fees, for example for migrating from one software package to another, will be discussed and agreed in advance.

We have clients using Quickbooks, FreeAgent, Xero, Clearbooks, Pandle and VT accounts for convenience and/or for VAT MTD and we enjoy keeping up our expertise with multiple software packages and their latest features, to ensure we make the best recommendation for your business needs.

We are happy to work with any existing record keeping systems that you are using, and in the first year of working together will review if there are other methods, systems or software that could make things easier and save you time. Spreadsheets remain perfectly acceptable for small businesses, we have templates that can help you streamline your record keeping onto one single spreadsheet, and use exported data from your internet banking to save you most or all of the data entry work.

If MTD for income tax becomes mandatory in the future, we are assured there will be spreadsheet bridging solutions, as there are for VAT, so while cloud accounting software is often very convenient for those that like apps and technology, it is unlikely to become mandatory any time soon. In April 2023, Jane MacArthur was invited (via her Institute, the ICAEW) as one of eleven sole practitioners to a roundtable discussion with HMRC’s MTD team, on what they should do about MTD proposals for micro businesses with under £30,000 turnover, resulting in this summary being sent to HMRC:

https://www.icaew.com/insights/tax-news/2023/may-2023/icaew-calls-for-fresh-thinking-on-mtd-itsa-policy

Amati uses the secure software IRIS OpenSpace for us to upload documents for each other, such as your accounting records and information to complete your tax return, and including any documents that need your e-approval or e-signature such as our engagement letters, your accounts and tax returns. This means you can have peace of mind that your private information and detailed financial documents are not vulnerable as insecure email attachments.

Our GDPR policy can be reviewed here. 

Longstanding experience of navigating the deteriorating systems and services of HMRC, particularly with regard to refunds and corrections.