Hi Reader

After the chaos and drama of the self-assessment season in January, February has gone by in a blur! I guess it's not been helped by it being a short month.

I finally had to admit in mid-February that I needed some time out to reset my brain (so I can keep giving you the best nuggets of accountancy and taxation gold) and honestly, that downtime has really helped.

So take this as a reminder, that if you are your business, you also need to make sure you have some time off occasionally (especially after a busy period) to rest, refresh and refocus.

Now let's get into the other things that have happened this month and some key dates for March.

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Making next year's tax return easier

FACT: 861,085 people filed their 2021/22 self-assessment tax return on the 31st of January (deadline day) and 36,767 of those were in the last hour (between 23:00 and 23:59)!

Isn't that a crazy statistic?

If stats are your thing, you can read more of the numbers from HMRC here.​

If you were one of those 861,085 filings on deadline day and you don't want that stress to be repeated with your 2022/23 tax return, there are things you can do to get on top of it now. Future you, will thank you for it I promise (and so will your accountant if you use one!). If you are a chronic late filer, I recently wrote a blog piece on what you can do to make 2022/23 easier, which you can read a snippet of below...

Unfortunately, the first piece of advice is to start early. You may have just filed your 2021/22 tax return, but I now want you to start getting everything together for 2022/23. This is about being proactive so you don’t panic in January 2024.

I know we still have 2 more months of this tax year left, but getting the past 10 months together now will save you a lot of time and stress later. You can then add the two final months on once they've happened, which makes it so much more manageable.

Now is also a good time to think about the systems you use. Do you stash all of your accounting records in a carrier bag (I hope you at least flatten them out!) or do you use a spreadsheet? Do you use accounting software...

Read the full blog post here

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In non-accountancy news

The good weather in February bought about the return of some motorcycle adventures with Scarlet (my wonderful Honda CB650R). As you can see she is unintentionally very on-brand! (In case you were wondering, her colour is "Candy Chromosphere Red"!)

When I am not crunching numbers I can normally be found pootling around with her on an adventure to find coffee and cake or a good breakfast/lunch spot. With that being said, you'd be surprised how many airfields there are in Hampshire that do a good fry-up, so any aviation geeks take note.

This month's adventures weren't long as it is still a little on the cold side, but those few hours were good for my soul and I even found breakfast by way of a bacon and egg bap at Loomies (a local motorbike cafe).

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What's coming up

During March I'm going to be sharing more information about business expenses and what you can and can't claim (a popular request!). I'll also be talking about how your feet could get you in trouble with HMRC(?!), and what on earth tax years are. So give me a follow on Instagram if you're not following me already, to hear about all these things and more in March.

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Key dates for March

• 1st - Corporation tax payments for company year-ends of 31st May 2022
• 7th - Filing deadline for VAT returns for the period 01/10/2022 to 31/01/2023
• 15th - Spring Budget. Any relevant updates from this will be included in the April newsletter
• 22nd - Deadline for electronic filing of PAYE, NIC and CIS to HMRC
• 31st - Filing of corporation tax returns for the period ending 31st March 2022
• And finally, advance notice of out of office: 20/03/23 to 02/04/2023

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