Tax Tips - expert offers landlords guidance as new year beckons

Yes all very well and dandy, but many people have jobs and or savings and as much as I would love my P60 and P11D and bank interest statements to magically appear tomorrow, they don't in fact it can be several weeks.

I agree with the above, I'm working on mine as we speak, I'm still paper and pen however I then submit it to my Accountant who checks it and submits it online on my behalf, normally all done and agreed by July, job done

Mike. How could it be a perfect time to get your finances in order, when your finances have been robbed.

I have put money in Premium Bonds earmarked for next year's tax payment but try to leave it in and use ready access savings for the actual payment.

I've had a few £25 wins but nothing significant - still it's some £25 wins that I wouldn't have won if I had paid my tax too early.

I've been using landlord software for the first time this year in preparation for MTD and have very mixed feelings about it.
Initially it involved many, many hours of complete confusion and large amounts of swearing. That phase lasted about 3 months.
The next 3 months were better. I gained confidence and even undid some of my earlier errors.
More recently I got to the point where I thought I was getting quite good at using it. I was using more elements of the package, not just the accounting bit. It has details of all the tenants, churns out tenancy agreements, stores copies of gas safety certificates, etc.

Then we got towards the end of my financial year (31st March) and it completely freaked me out. It contains a SA105 report which is supposed to show how much each of us have earned, spent, etc and how much tax we will each pay. My portfolio is unequally owned so this report is probably more important for me than it might be for less complicated situations. It's caused me to have 2 completely panic stricken phone calls with my accountant. One relating to how it doesn't deal with other earned income and SIPP contributions properly. The second call was yesterday because it hadn't recognised my year end and continued adding this year's income into last year's accounts. Much Googling about year ends, cash basis and accrual accounting and several emails to the software provider later it turns out that while most of their system recognises my actual financial year end that particular report doesn't. There is no warning on their website mentioning this fact. So that aspect of it has been very disappointing and frustrating.

Overall I guess I predominantly get on with it OK. I could probably submit all my property related accounts to my accountant this week. I have made a list of errors I haven't been able to sort out and areas that won't tally with bank statements such as utility bills. He has access to the software anyway.
It's probably taught me better accounting procedures and as I pay for everything by Direct Debit or credit card the live banking reconciliation has been really good.

If the government think the switch to MTD is going to go smoothly they are seriously deluded. I made a very big effort to engage with the software and picked a year where I could make every mistake going. It's been a very steep learning curve. I'm a landlord not an accountant

• Andrew townshend
• 05 April 2023 18:01 PM

I'm dreading it Jo, online banking, emails and ordering things online I'm fine with, anything more than that and I'm lost, as the saying goes '' you can't teach an old dog new tricks'', and I am that old dog

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• John Young
• 05 April 2023 20:07 PM

Computers have been a bit of a hobby for me. I started when the Spectrum came out back in the late 70's. My son is a software developer, so with my old school skills and his modern skills we can figure out most things!

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Lets call it what it is ''spyware" they will analyse every aspect of your family finances every transaction and cross reference with those you transact payments with they will be able to work out exactly how far they can bleed you before they destroy you
And the icing on the cake is few people will get this right all the time so the potential for billions of pounds in fines

Computers is the worst thing to happen in my life.
I was able to do everything for decades but now admin has quadrupled wasting my time.
Even today hour & half for 2 phone calls, one failed completely after talking to 4 different recording talking machines at Barclays Bank because my Account was locked and couldn’t check the transactions and still is, because the code I used last time wouldn’t work, none of the recording would ask the question I wanted the answer to, kept telling me to go to the website as if I hadn’t tried it in vain, if a human answered the phone I am sure a minute would suffice. The other call kept me in a queuing system for 40 minutes just listening to music for someone to deal with my call, Brilliant.
Without those Computer’s we wouldn’t have all those stupid Rules and Regulation’s because they couldn’t just sit there pressing buttons inventing them.
A major contributory factor in the cause of homelessness, now put that in your pipe and smoke it.