As an influencer, you might monetise your work through brand deals, sponsorships, host reads, streaming services, video platform revenue, subscription services or any combination of that list.

With so many revenue streams, such variety in jobs, and so many other possible questions, keeping your accounts accurate and compliant can be a full-time job of its own. Here are some key elements we recommend you watch for.

Do Account for Every Stream

There’s a persistent bit of tax misinformation out there which states that if an individual revenue stream is below a certain threshold it can safely be ignored. Needless to say, this is untrue!

All the same, whoever first spread this about was clearly very persuasive. Many people still believe this claim today, and it can create major issues for them once they start filing incomplete returns.

Know Your Expenses

If you upgrade your cameras, microphones, or lighting over a tax year, these would certainly be allowable expenses. The same would be true for ongoing subscriptions relevant to your work, new editing software, and a number of other items.

However, if you’ve bought something both for your professional work and your own use, and if you’ve spent enough that you might exceed expense limits, this becomes more complicated. We recommend consulting someone who can advise you on specifics before you make major purchases that might be affected, and don’t forget to keep a running tally through the year.

Be Ready to Register for VAT When You Need to

If your total turnover exceeds the VAT threshold in a single year, or you expect it to do so in the next 30 days, you must be VAT registered. As that turnover could include many different, tiny streams, keeping track of it is essential until you actually register.

At the time of writing that threshold is £90,000.

Understand How Business Structures Affect Your Bottom Line

As a sole trader, a partnership, or a limited company, the way you pay yourself, your tag obligations, your profitability and your personal liability can all vary. What company structure you use is a major decision factor as a result.

More importantly, these factors are influenced by your income, your expenditures, plans for expansion and even your tolerance for financial risk.

We strongly recommend discussing your situation with an experienced accountant who understands your field before making a decision. Why not get in touch to find out more?

The post Accountancy Tips for Creatives & Influencers first appeared on ICS Accounting.

The post IR35 FAQ first appeared on ICS Accounting.

Know Exactly Where You Work

For most purposes, including taxation, UK waters are defined as our territorial waters out to 12 nautical miles from the nearest coast, and a few other designated areas. If you find work on a rig outside these waters, perhaps in another nation’s agreed oil exploration areas, you will be paying tax elsewhere, under different regulations.

As such, from the moment you receive a job offer it can be important to know which waters you’ll be working in.

Double Check Double Taxation

A number of offshore oil workers we’ve spoken to have been surprised at least once in their career to discover that they’re working in a country that doesn’t have a Double Taxation Agreement (DTA) with the UK.

Despite the name, DTAs are actually a good thing; they’re designed to prevent situations where a worker is ‘double taxed’, having tax obligations to two different nations at once, while still ensuring that both governments are happy with the tax situation. As you can imagine, this is a fine line to walk!

The UK has more than 100 different DTAs with other nations. These include the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, and Norway – all major nations in the North Sea oil and gas industry.

Understand Your Tax Implications

As well as working in UK waters or in a nation with a DTA, the factors that can affect your tax obligations (and your available tax opportunities) as well as National Insurance contributions include:

• Do you work for a UK company?
• Are you a UK national or a foreign national?
• Are you paid through your own limited company and, if so, where is it registered?

Overseas contracts are likely to trigger foreign tax reporting requirements. Operating through a UK limited company will raise considerations of corporation tax and dividends.

Consider IR35 Compliance

As always, whether or not you’re in compliance with IR35 is a huge factor in the end value of what you’re paid. For offshore workers, you’ll be working in a specific location, which is part of the test of control that’s part of the IR35 status tests. This makes it even more important that you look at the rest of these tests to ensure you have a correct determination.

As always, there are many other factors that can significantly affect the profitability of a given contract for offshore oil workers, but the above summary covers the most common questions. If you believe you may be affected by another factor and want an expert opinion, or if you simply want to understand exactly what the tax implications of a given role are in the 2026/27 tax year, please get in touch to arrange a discussion.

The post Accounting Tips for Offshore Oil Workers first appeared on ICS Accounting.

Quite honestly, a balance sheet is a powerful tool for making business decisions. While they can take some time to learn to read, the way they present information is extremely useful.

Why Do You Need a Balance Sheet?

As a limited company, of course, you need a balance sheet as part of your tax records. But balance sheets are also a key part of your management accounts. Management accounts weren’t designed for tax records; over decades, the techniques for management accounts have developed to help to plan for the future.

Your balance sheet is a snapshot; it gives you a clear, detailed picture of your assets, liabilities, and your net book value at the moment the balance sheet is created.

Only the smallest sole traders can really keep all of this information in their heads, but experience has taught us that as a business grows, some owners continue to believe their mental picture is accurate enough to be useful over time. (Even then, we recommend you keep your Profit and Loss (P&L) sheet up to date.)

With these accounts, you can more easily and effectively identify where individual projects, products, or customers are becoming a problem. Starting while still a small business gives you practice reading these reports for the point where the business has grown enough that there’s no other way to track your performance.

Many lenders also require a balance sheet as part of a loan submission. Your balance sheet will show what existing obligations you have, and it also confirms the extent of your assets. This information allows lenders to feel confident when offering loans.

Using Your Balance Sheet

A balance sheet is split into two sides (the name comes from the process of balancing the two).

You record your assets on one side. This includes the value of all property and equipment owned by the business and the total liquid assets. Calculating equipment value can often be the most complicated part of the process.

On the other side, current liabilities should be added – this is anything payable within a year – wages, loans, pending supplier payments, and taxes – alongside your equity (retained earnings and common stock).

You should find that the two values are identical. If they aren’t, check all starting figures and calculations carefully to identify any error in your working. If there’s no error in your working, you have a serious problem on your hands. Most likely, the issue will be with your cash flow.

If you find you have a serious issue, we encourage you to get in touch – we may be able to help you identify the problem and start figuring out a solution.

The post Using Your Balance Sheet first appeared on ICS Accounting.

Tax regulations in the UK are not designed to be so complicated that only professionals can handle them, but as they evolve constantly, it’s still important to keep up to date with the latest changes so you can understand the implications of any that affect you.

At the heart of a correctly filed tax report are accurate records and double-checked calculations. The third ingredient, however, is time – the time needed to keep your records up to date, to identify any unexpected tax liabilities and to make sure you’re aware of all tax opportunities. The less experience you have, the more time you’ll need to take.

That’s why many sole traders still want their accountants to do their self-assessment.

Should You Ask an Accountant for Your Self-Assessment?

If you don’t have time to do your self-assessment with the diligence it deserves, or if you’re not confident in your understanding of all relevant tax regulations, you might want to have an accountant handle your self-assessment tax returns. In fact, this is one of the government’s own suggestions!

Sources of Tax

The fact of the matter is that the majority of incorrect self-assessments are the result of tax sources that the filer may not have been aware needed to be part of the assessment.

It’s not just about the income received directly from your business. If you also have income from renting property or you’ve sold items qualifying for capital gains tax during the year, these also need to be represented. Even interest on your savings should be taken into account!

A sometimes-controversial factor is the High Income Child Benefit Charge. If you or your partner receive child benefit and your individual income is above £60,000, you qualify for this charge. This can also be true if someone else receives child benefit for a child who lives with you, provided they contribute at least an equal amount toward their upkeep.

This charge is levied to reduce the government’s additional spending for the keep and care of children in cases where at least one of their parents or guardians is capable of shouldering the full amount. The controversy comes from the way it is levied, meaning that if you were near the threshold and your income increases above it (but not by much), you may feel unduly affected.

Claimable Expense Types

As a self-employed individual, a number of different categories can be expensed.

This blog is not the place to go into each one in detail, but if you weren’t aware of any of the following being eligible for expenses, you may be missing out on these and others:

• Staff costs (if any)
• Office costs including phone bills, stationery, etc.
• Financial costs (insurance, bank charges, etc.)
• Costs associated with stock or raw materials
• Business travel costs
• Marketing expenses, including digital marketing
• Any training courses taken for the purpose of growing your business

As you can see, going into the specifics of what can be expensed under which circumstances would take much longer than this article – instead, we recommend you consult an accountant!

The post Should I Use an Accountant for My Self-Assessment? first appeared on ICS Accounting.

There are times, though, when a business can be performing profitably according to the books, but your bank balance is still low at any given time and you can struggle to make payment deadlines.

So how do you change that?

Improve Your Payment Cycle

Outside of shops, almost every business finds themselves doing some work on credit. Whether it’s 30-day terms (or even 90-day) as standard or your contract technically requires payment in advance, but a regular payment slips when the work still needs to be done, often a certain amount of your profitability is still waiting to be received.

By instituting tighter payment controls and by pushing your dunning cycle more efficiently, you can ensure your cashflow gets better and more in line with your profitability.

At ICS Accounting, we’ve heard many small business owners talk about the point where they realised some late-paying customers needed cutting out, even though they represented a significant amount of the company’s work. The hidden cost of delayed payment can sometimes more than wipe out your profit margins.

Of course, many customers who pay a little late sometimes are still valuable steps in building your own business. Cutting one off is something you need to be careful about doing – but it underlines the importance of knowing the true value of every customer.

Frequent Financial Review

How do you know the true value of your big customers? Make sure you review the books regularly, and at any time a lack of cashflow affects your business (when your payments are delayed, or when you miss out on opportunities because instead you have you make a payment), make sure you know whose payments were outstanding at that time.

This can be even more effective than just tracking which businesses pay late and how late they pay, but we recommend doing both. Confirming patterns in late payment and having the data to back them up gives you better decision making power than just having a vague feeling that Customer X pays late every so often.

While this does mean more time studying your financial information than you might spend otherwise, that has its own benefits. The longer it’s been since you looked at your management accounts, the less clear your picture of your situation is.

Build in a Buffer

The best way to keep your cashflow strong is to remember that as well as predictable payments (tax bills, VAT payments, etc.), there are one-off or unexpected payments that need to be made. By ring-fencing some of your paid profit as an emergency buffer you have more flexibility in these situations.

Know Your Tax Liabilities

This is one of those categories that should go without saying but doesn’t. We’ve quite often spoken to small business owners who weren’t clear on what tax legislation changes might do to their bill, or who didn’t fully understand what tax and National Insurance payments add to a new employee’s paycheque in costs, or who had a rough idea in mind of what tax they’d owe based on the previous year but had a much more successful year.

You really do need to be ready for your HMRC payment; while they will usually work with you on payment plans if you need to, these come with a significant additional cost (not to mention messing up your cashflow for the following year). If you can’t keep up to date with tax calculations, relevant regulatory changes, and the rest, why not get in touch? We’re always happy to help.

The post Managing Cash Flow as a Small Business first appeared on ICS Accounting.

As always with these blogs, we would recommend consulting directly with an accountant as specific situations do vary.

What is the Basic Rate for Dividend Taxes?

Beginning this past April 6^th, the Basic Rate has risen from 8.75% to 10.75% and the higher rate from 33.75% to 35.75%. The Additional rate remains fixed at 39.75%, and the dividend allowance remains at £500.

The tax on dividends remains lower than the equivalent tax on salary, but this cost has changed; the most tax efficient way to receive your payment will have changed in addition.

Obviously the best course of action will vary wildly between any two contractors or businesses depending upon your requirements. Other factors work taking into consideration include:

The ISA Allowance

Dividends received on investments held in an ISA are tax free; the maximum amount you can invest in ISAs each tax year is currently set to £20,000, and this allowance cannot be carried forward to future tax years.

Investments held inside an ISA are also exempt from income tax and capital gains tax. This is very tax efficient, but of course does require you to be able to set that money aside – so how far you can pursue this will vary not just according to your business results but also your own personal needs.

Pension Contributions

As with the ISA, paying dividends into a pension fund allows you to save for the longer term provided that you still leave yourself enough liquidity to handle the year’s expenses – and you should include some allowance for safety when you do!

Pension contributions qualify for tax relief at the marginal rate, which can significantly increase the savings made on any proportion of your income you’re willing to set aside for the long-term future.

Taxation Evolves

The best strategy for tax efficiencies will always shift slightly from year to year, and sometimes the ramifications of a change will not be immediately obvious. To make sure you maximise your available opportunities while still remaining fully compliant, we recommend regular discussions with your accountant.

Contact us today to find out how we can help.

The post Paying Dividend Taxes first appeared on ICS Accounting.

Awareness is Assurance

We work closely with many contractors with very different situations. Whether they’re outside or inside IR35, on long-term contracts with a steady income, or moving from contract to contract and juggling different revenue streams, every contractor needs to keep their accounts in order.

One way we’ve helped some of our clients is by making sure they understand what the different tax codes mean, so they can tell whether or not there’s going to be an issue in time to get it fixed.

The below isn’t a perfect substitute for working with a contractor accountant, but it can help you understand whether your latest payslip is also a ticking time bomb.

Reading The Tax Code

For the 2026/27 tax year, the country’s most common tax code is:

1257L

The four numbers to begin with specify your tax-free personal allowance for the tax year. This code ties to the standard personal allowance of £12,570.

The letter or letters following the numbers specify more to do with your calculations. ‘L’ simply means you’re entitled to the standard tax-free personal allowance.

However, if you have more than one job, and your personal allowance is entirely allotted to one of them, you may instead have the code BR. This stands for Basic Rate, meaning that all income from this source is taxed at the basic rate.

You may also see a T tax code – this means that your code will include other calculations needed to work out your personal allowance.

Some revenue streams are not taxed. When this is the case your tax code will read ‘NT’. For contractors, the most likely reason to receive an NT code is that you’re reporting this income to HMRC in some other way, but NT| codes also apply for some non-UK residents, or for those working while bankrupt.

Regional Tax Codes

If you’re working in Wales or working remotely for a Welsh business, you’ll see a ‘C’ in the code. This simply means that your income will be taxed using the Welsh rates. Similarly, a ‘S’ in your code means your income from that source is taxed at the Scottish rate.

Both the C and S codes combine with other relevant codes.

This means, for example, that if you’ve completely used up your Personal Allowance, and you have two income sources from remote jobs, one based in England and the other in Wales, one will have the ‘0T’ code and the other will be marked as ‘C0T’.

Emergency Tax Codes

If you see a ‘W1’, ‘M1’, or ‘X’ on your tax code, this means you’re on an emergency tax code. W1 is for weekly payments, m1 for monthly payments, and X for when pay dates vary. Some payroll software marks these as ‘NONCUM’ instead.

As the name suggests, you shouldn’t be on an emergency tax code for an extended period of time. It is not uncommon for emergency tax payments to be higher than you would otherwise pay, and this is usually handled later on. We would recommend you pay attention to your deductions during and immediately after the emergency tax code is resolved.

Higher Rate Tax Codes

D codes – that is, ‘D0’, ‘D1’, and in Scotland ‘D2’ and ‘D3’, specify that all income from that source is taxed at higher than basic rates, usually because another income source already reaches the maximum for the basic rate:

• D0 – Higher rate
• D1 – Additional rate
• CD0 – Welsh higher rate
• CD1 – Welsh additional rate
• SD0 – Scottish intermediate rate
• SD1 – Scottish higher rate
• SD2 – Scottish advanced rate
• SD3 – Scottish top rate

K Tax Codes

K codes indicate that you already have income or deductions higher than your personal allowance which are not already being taxed.

There are a number of reasons for K codes. Probably the most common is that you are receiving your state pension or a taxable state benefit. If you’re paying tax owed from a previous year, or if your savings provide more interest than your personal savings allowance, you will receive a ‘K’ tax code.

Marriage Tax Codes

The Marriage Allowance permits married individuals with an income below their personal allowance to transfer £1260 of your personal allowance to their husband, wife, or civil partner.

When this is the case, the individual transferring their personal allowance away will see an ‘N’ on their tax code. Their partner will see an ‘M’ on theirs.

Taking Your Tax Code into Account

Especially when you have multiple income streams, either lasting throughout the tax year or not, your tax codes can help you understand your income in real terms more easily. However, they can also be daunting to calculate. If you want any help understanding what your tax codes mean for you, please get in touch to arrange a chat.

The post Understanding Tax Codes first appeared on ICS Accounting.

Errors can easily creep into bookkeeping – it’s why reconciling is so important – and it gets easier to accumulate errors if:

• You’ve neglected your records for a while and a deadline is coming up
• You’re having or you have had issues with record storage, physical or digital
• You’ve ever had to update your books while tired at the end of the day
• Regulations, legislation, or guidelines have recently updated and you haven’t had the chance to review them

As you can imagine, when we’re onboarding new clients at ICS Accounting we quite often catch discrepancies, and unpicking the evidence to get at the original problem has made us familiar with a lot of common errors. So here are some things you should definitely watch for.

Separation of Personal and Business Accounts

For sole traders, this is easily the most common issue. We highly recommend creating a business account as well as a personal account – it may not change your liability, but it makes it much easier to monitor your cashflow.

If you’re still waiting for a client to pay that overdue invoice, it can be tempting to pay business expenses with your personal card (always assuming you have the money there). If you have no other option, of course we wouldn’t tell you not to do that! But make sure you document this clearly as soon as possible. Earmarking your money for business and personal use is a huge part of the sole trader financial process, and failing to do so can cost businesses.

It’s not just sole traders who have to deal with this, either. You might order work items via your personal Amazon, and if so, you need to ensure the invoice makes it to your work records or reconciling your balance sheet will have an extra, unnecessary level of confusion.

Lost Receipts

Most of us grow up only really worrying about receipts for very expensive purchases or for gifts. In business, however, lost receipts can become a really big problem. Learning new habits for this can be challenging.

Most modern accountancy software will let you scan your receipts in on your phone and digitise them. We recommend doing this as soon as possible for multiple reasons:

• Your records will be more up-to-date
• It ensures they don’t get lost
• It ensures they’re scanned before the ink on cheap receipts rubs or fades away to unreadability
• Handwritten receipts (still common in some industries) can be harder to read, and still knowing the information on them makes it much easier.

Get into the habit of scanning receipts as soon as possible, and create a safe space they can be stored until they can.

Making Assumptions

Do you know what type of expense that payment was? Is your depreciation calculation correct? What’s the rate for National Insurance Contributions (NICs) on the income you’ve made this month? Are you logging that Christmas bonus against tax using the usual bonus rules or the Christmas rules?

If you’re not sure, check and double check, especially if the reason you’re not sure is that it last came up a couple of years ago. Tax legislation evolves every year, and along the way many subtle distinctions are created. This means that if you’re not fully familiar with the current situation, you could easily end up with incorrect reports or paying your taxes incorrectly. Both of these have real and serious consequences.

So if you’re not sure, double check, and if you are, ask yourself how sure you really are.

Missed Tax Opportunities

Yes, you should always take the time to make sure you understand your tax obligations. At the same time, it’s not uncommon to miss out entirely on tax deductions you’re eligible for simply because you didn’t know they existed.

Failing to recognise your tax obligations can result in significant penalties. Missing out on tax opportunities carries no official penalty but can make the difference between a business that survives and one that thrives.

Rushing The Accounting Process

Accurate bookkeeping, unfortunately, isn’t something that can be done quickly. It requires an up-to-date knowledge of current financial legislation, attention to detail, and a willingness to take time to get it right.

At the same time, accurate bookkeeping is a key pillar of any successful business. How confident are you really that you can hold all your business’ current assets and liabilities in your head without double-checking?

Correct accounting isn’t just vital for your tax obligations. It’s also a cornerstone of good decision making. If you think yours needs support, please get in touch.

The post Bookkeeping Errors to Avoid first appeared on ICS Accounting.

But as a sole trader or a limited company director, especially if you’re a contractor limited company or a small business, it can be a lot harder to figure out how much to pay yourself under these circumstances. In many cases, your absence will mean a measurable drop in company income; if you’re the only person in the business, it may mean a complete halt in revenue.

Under these circumstances, how much you can pay yourself (and how long you can pay yourself for) will depend on a number of different factors. Let’s take a look.

Business Liquidity

Most obviously, you can’t pay yourself more than your business’ cashflow permits. This is another situation where your management accounts can be essential. Regularly reconciling your accounts remains the best way to understand your actual financial position in real terms.

For the most part, businesses have significant fixed costs that don’t go away even if you’re not there to manage the ship; in many cases, the amount of expenses incurred by actually doing the work are negligible in comparison.

Forecast Horizons

As with liquidity, your management accounts have a huge role to play here. That information can significantly extend the timescale for your planning. From there you have a clearer picture of how long you could afford to step back from the business before you run into issues – which is another upper limit on this situation!

Deadlines

Here, alas, as accountants we can’t point you in the right direction. You’ll still need to be aware of any upcoming deadlines, how much work each of these represents, and how much time you’ll have to get it all done.

The above factors mostly limit how long you can take off, but they’re also a factor in setting an upper limit in what you can pay yourself. Having defined our upper limits, let’s look at the lower limits.

Personal Needs

The last factor to take into account is much simpler, and again it’s one that can’t easily be read from your business finances. Simply put, how much will you need over the time you’re not working? Subtract from this any of your existing personal finances you’re willing to spend and you have a lower limit.

Unfortunately, unlike an employee, it’s possible at this point to look at the maths and decide that voluntary time off isn’t possible, or at least isn’t worth it. However, sometimes this isn’t a choice; a significant illness or broken arm at the wrong time can have a huge impact on your business until it’s grown past a certain point.

We do recommend business interruption insurance against situations like this, but in the event you find yourself facing harsh decisions over how long you can afford to be away or how much you can justify taking from the business while you are, we also encourage you to reach out to us. We’ll be happy to help you get clarity on the numbers – something that’s essential if you want to make the right decisions.

The post How Should You Pay Yourself When You’re Not Working? first appeared on ICS Accounting.