Reply to: Should I complain ?

[Lance]

Due to the fact that the % cannot be fiddled with once set and since it is called tax 'planning', shouldn't the plan include some look ahead scenarios.

I'm not sure you can't change the % shareholding. What makes you say that?
As long as the shares are the same class, and you're married to your spouse then you have case law to allow you shift income in this way.

Personally I wouldn't fiddle with it too much as that may attract attention (every change is registered with companies house). But if there's a change in circumstances then go for it.
An example would be a wife who gets a promotion in permie land. That would mean that she has less time to spend on director duties so should let some of her shares go. Best if she sells them (my shares are worth £1 each and there are 10 of them) to you so it's above board.

If you shuffle them monthly, for no reason other than tax, then GAAR could become a factor I believe.

[Lance]

37 hours - Watching people hurl insults at each other in the Brexit forum
0.5 hours - Filling in timesheet

there was me thinking you made your timesheet up rather than being honest.
Bravo to you.

[northernladuk]

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and advise, much appreciated. A bit of a follow up on my initial points if I may:

ADVICE

2. The general advise in this forum on how to chose an accountancy firm is to talk to a few of the ones recommended here and gauge the comfort level as a gut feel. If the initial discussion is with a smooth talking first point of contact, you are sold but will later get an accountant with whom the feel might be different. So probably it is a good idea to ask which accountant will be assigned for how long and have a chat with him/her before committing. Appreciate @ Maslins' point about change in circumstances for employees but it looks like in my case the first accountant is still around but I got passed to a new joinee in the firm.

ADVICE

If that's what you want to do then fair enough. I don't think I've spoken to my accountant in over a year thinking about. It's all been done by mail but you do have a point. I left SJD because the final straw was an accountant that was just awful to speak to on the phone. Had numerous accountants since and never had a problem. Not a bad idea I guess.

4. Here are my reasons to have a spreadsheet with all calculations and happy to be shot down if there is a better way of doing it.
4a. Totally personal reason. Even though I read the theory in prose so many times all over the internet, it never clicks in the brain until all the numbers are laid out from the start to finish. It gives a reassurance that the numbers that the accountant/freeagent calculates and me signing off makes sense.
4b. As excellent as freeagent is, it does not take into account 'all' income and expenditure to give a holistic picture. For example, my spreadsheet accomodates rental and savings interest incomes, my spouse's permie income, her salary/pension numbers, Dividend share splits, and churns out final tax bill including income tax owed for both - the full picture of how much comes in and goes out for the family.
4c. Freeagent is great for everything past upto this point in time, but cannot do any 'What if' scenarios. In the spreadie I can do What if I raise the rent by £50pm, how much of that is treated as taxable income, how much extra in tax will be pushed to the higher Dividend tax bracket and so how much extra voluntary pension will my spouse have to pay to mitigate it and then how much will her take home salary drop and will that make her angry that the hand bag has to wait for one more month.. LOL

Freeagent is for your company bookkeeping, not your personal one so you will need a spreadsheet for that. Don't mix up your business and your personal incomes. Totally different things. Freeagent sorts one, up to you to sort the rest.

5. If it is bespoke tax advice that I am after, are there any recommendations from any of the members please ? How will this be different from an independent financial adviser (a couple of which I had some initial discussions with and were somewhat waste of time)

Dunno. Been happy with the responses from my accountant but to be fair had to push the personal questions a little but got reasonable answers eventually. Not sure if it's 100% but seems fine from my limited knowledge. My situation isn't any more complicated than one BTL extra thought to be fair.

6. I am not fully convinced with reply that due to time and resource constraints, the advice on how to decide share splits will be predominantly based on the current scenarios only. Due to the fact that the % cannot be fiddled with once set and since it is called tax 'planning', shouldn't the plan include some look ahead scenarios. I was a total newbie when the percentages were set, but if it was today I know that since the spouse has a PAYE income in the top of the basic rate band, any substantial share split for her will result in very little utilization of the basic rate Dividend tax and all declared dividend will be taxed at higher rate - especially as the dividend allowance has further dropped this tax year. This means that she has to now look at a huge voluntary pension contribution if the basic rate Dividend tax has to be utilized - not ideal at all.

I tough one this. You'd be annoyed if they planned it ahead and due to some unforeseen circumstances it was wrong again but I do think it should have been considered. As long as you don't do it too often there isn't a problem with changing share allocation. Business's do change so it's not a mortal sin to do it. Doing it every year is too aggressive and will raise a flag. I assume the accountant gave you the advice that's most efficient for the year and will give you advice on how to be efficient for the next year going forward.

[PoH]

Thanks to everyone for your thoughts and advise, much appreciated. A bit of a follow up on my initial points if I may:

2. The general advise in this forum on how to chose an accountancy firm is to talk to a few of the ones recommended here and gauge the comfort level as a gut feel. If the initial discussion is with a smooth talking first point of contact, you are sold but will later get an accountant with whom the feel might be different. So probably it is a good idea to ask which accountant will be assigned for how long and have a chat with him/her before committing. Appreciate @ Maslins' point about change in circumstances for employees but it looks like in my case the first accountant is still around but I got passed to a new joinee in the firm.

4. Here are my reasons to have a spreadsheet with all calculations and happy to be shot down if there is a better way of doing it.
4a. Totally personal reason. Even though I read the theory in prose so many times all over the internet, it never clicks in the brain until all the numbers are laid out from the start to finish. It gives a reassurance that the numbers that the accountant/freeagent calculates and me signing off makes sense.
4b. As excellent as freeagent is, it does not take into account 'all' income and expenditure to give a holistic picture. For example, my spreadsheet accomodates rental and savings interest incomes, my spouse's permie income, her salary/pension numbers, Dividend share splits, and churns out final tax bill including income tax owed for both - the full picture of how much comes in and goes out for the family.
4c. Freeagent is great for everything past upto this point in time, but cannot do any 'What if' scenarios. In the spreadie I can do What if I raise the rent by £50pm, how much of that is treated as taxable income, how much extra in tax will be pushed to the higher Dividend tax bracket and so how much extra voluntary pension will my spouse have to pay to mitigate it and then how much will her take home salary drop and will that make her angry that the hand bag has to wait for one more month.. LOL

5. If it is bespoke tax advice that I am after, are there any recommendations from any of the members please ? How will this be different from an independent financial adviser (a couple of which I had some initial discussions with and were somewhat waste of time)

6. I am not fully convinced with reply that due to time and resource constraints, the advice on how to decide share splits will be predominantly based on the current scenarios only. Due to the fact that the % cannot be fiddled with once set and since it is called tax 'planning', shouldn't the plan include some look ahead scenarios. I was a total newbie when the percentages were set, but if it was today I know that since the spouse has a PAYE income in the top of the basic rate band, any substantial share split for her will result in very little utilization of the basic rate Dividend tax and all declared dividend will be taxed at higher rate - especially as the dividend allowance has further dropped this tax year. This means that she has to now look at a huge voluntary pension contribution if the basic rate Dividend tax has to be utilized - not ideal at all.

[VelcroPower]

but you're well practiced now

37 hours - Watching people hurl insults at each other in the Brexit forum
0.5 hours - Filling in timesheet

[Lance]

The hardest thing I had to do at that age when training was make up my timesheet at 4:30pm on a Friday.

but you're well practiced now

[VelcroPower]

Yes from what I gather they are graded on accuracy and other metrics and nothing leaves the building without significant oversight. Going straight from school to that production-line KPI driven environment would probably have turned me off accountancy for life though.

The hardest thing I had to do at that age when training was make up my timesheet at 4:30pm on a Friday.

[Maslins]

At two firms for sure. ClearSky are quite open about it with the "Optionis Academy"

It's basically 16 years olds straight from school onto apprenticeships studying AAT. They don't communicate with clients but they are working on the basic book keeping.

Fair play. Inevitably it won't be the most fun or well paid job (indeed I wonder whether the firms fully exploit the trivial NMW that applies to apprentices!), but for a lot of youngsters school isn't great, and with tuition fees they don't want to go to uni. If by 19 you're fully qualified AAT with 3 years experience under your belt, that puts you ahead of most 21 year old new graduates in terms of desirability from perhaps better paid accountancy roles.

If like you say they don't communicate with clients, and presumably any important data is checked by someone more senior/experienced, doesn't sound like a bad thing to me.

[VelcroPower]

I don't think that is true.

At two firms for sure. ClearSky are quite open about it with the "Optionis Academy"

It's basically 16 years olds straight from school onto apprenticeships studying AAT. They don't communicate with clients but they are working on the basic book keeping.

[northernladuk]

(actual children in a lot of circumstances).

I don't think that is true.

[VelcroPower]

(2) is something we know is a real bone of contention with clients. They feel like they have a relationship with their accountant Joe Bloggs who understands their business, then get a message out of the blue that Joe's disappeared and someone else will be assisting. Most accountancy firms will know that low staff turnover is a key to long term success, but the reality is people's circumstances change. They emigrate, seek an opportunity in another firm, get pregnant, decide to change career completely. As employers we can't stop that. All we can do is hopefully provide a nice working environment so they stay fairly long before eventually, inevitably, decide it's time to move on.

In order to keep prices down many get younger, less experienced, staff in (actual children in a lot of circumstances), train them up and then they just move on because they want audit work or to do SME accounts or they get tempted over to the dark side (Management Accounts), or just not be part of a sausage factory so you will get higher staff turnover than in most other accountancy disciplines.

[Maslins]

As a small practice owner, I'd agree with the above. I appreciate you're disappointed, and that always sucks...but I do feel your expectations are too high.

You could change accountants, but I imagine most will follow a similar pattern.

The word "proactive" is one that pains me. To some clients us telling them "Hello, a reminder your tax of £X is payable in a fortnight" is amazing proactivity. To others, they seem to think being proactive means we should know what they're thinking about doing, before they do it, and advise them on it, without them mentioning what they're thinking first. We're not mind readers.

(2) is something we know is a real bone of contention with clients. They feel like they have a relationship with their accountant Joe Bloggs who understands their business, then get a message out of the blue that Joe's disappeared and someone else will be assisting. Most accountancy firms will know that low staff turnover is a key to long term success, but the reality is people's circumstances change. They emigrate, seek an opportunity in another firm, get pregnant, decide to change career completely. As employers we can't stop that. All we can do is hopefully provide a nice working environment so they stay fairly long before eventually, inevitably, decide it's time to move on.

You can grumble to the accounting firm if you like. They might offer some kind of goodwill gesture. However trying to complain beyond that (eg to an accounting institute) would be a complete waste of your time. It doesn't sound like they've done anything wrong, other than not meet your perhaps unrealistically high expectations.

[WordIsBond]

all good advice so far.

I'd add that if the OP wants to have a conversation and feel loved that he writes a list of queries, not dissimilar to his list, stick them in an email and ask for half an hour to talk through them at a convenient time.
They'll arrange a time to do that and it will also allow them to prepare answers for your questions.

And it gives you a chance to lay out exactly why you think billing should have started later, instead of recounting it verbally to someone who may not be listening as well as they should.

[Lance]

all good advice so far.

I'd add that if the OP wants to have a conversation and feel loved that he writes a list of queries, not dissimilar to his list, stick them in an email and ask for half an hour to talk through them at a convenient time.
They'll arrange a time to do that and it will also allow them to prepare answers for your questions.

[northernladuk]

Excellent post from VelcroPower so saved me having to do it.

Not much to add to that really. If you are with who I think you are with you will get a review of your account every 3 months at VAT time. They will point out things like you haven't claimed your office allowance, wrongly allocated expenses, query and large or odd looking entries and so on which is pretty useful to be fair but even then it's just keeping your accounts in order rather than proactive advice.

They are just glorified book keepers so it's up to you to run your business. Don't be disheartened about the amount of time you've spent learning. It will put you ahead of a vast majority of contractors and if you hang around here long enough you'll see that from the some of the dateless posts people put up, particularly those in trouble because they've not taken the time to understand the basics.

I don't think I've ever seen advice saying ask your accountant to give you a demo? I am sure in the past people have said you can sign up for FA for free so you can have a play. It's very straightforward and there is a freeagent forum to check if you have questions. Accountants can charge upwards of 80 quid an hour so you can't expect much from them for 90 quid a month as I've already pointed out.

Sounds like you are in exactly the same boat as the rest of us so nothing to worry about even if it hasn't met your expectations.