Networking Invitation
An open networking event in Crawley
I’m the Group Leader at the 4Networking Crawley group.
Here is your chance to be part of the 4Networking Crawley group’s Big Breakfast: 50 people all keen to meet you and hear about your products and services, and it will all be happening at The Regency Hotel, Old Hollow, Worth on Thursday the 1st April 2010 at 08h00. You can find directions to the venue HERE.
It is hosted by 4 networking but open to all businesses. 4Networking is the UK’s largest joined up network with over 25,000 members and 200 live groups.
This is ‘The Crawley Big Breakfast’ and is open to all business people.
It is important to book your place, and to do so you can book your place on line HERE.
Here’s what you can expect at a 4N breakfast meeting.
08:00 Open networking – Great chance to ease yourself into it – over coffee/tea/juice.
08:30 The 30 Seconds Round – This is the bit where you get to broadcast your message to the group.
09:00 5-minute break – to recharge your cup and book your 3 x 10-minute appointments (‘1-2-1s’).
09:10 4Sight Slot – Insight, not a sales pitch, into a member’s specialist field.
09:25 The Appointment Rounds – 3 x 10-minute ‘1-2-1’ appointments with the members you chose to fast-track business relationships.
10:00 Meeting close – After this, you may stay and continue networking!
For further information visit the 4Networking website, where you can also network with other users.
There will be £10 charge (cash please) to cover the cost of the breakfast and we’ll make a receipt available to you after the meeting on the 4Networking website.
It’s on a first come basis and places are limited to 50 people
I look forward to hearing from you and meeting you on 1 April 2010.
HMRC has announced that from 1 April 2010 it will be treating payments made by cheque for VAT as received on the date cleared funds reach its bank account.
This is a significant change and one of which businesses need to take account. From 1 April 2010 if you send in your VAT return and payment to arrive by the due date the payment will be late because it will clear on a date after receipt. This will leave your business liable to a late payment penalty. Currently late payment surcharges are on a sliding scale from 2% to 15% – be late paying at your peril.
After 1 April 2010 you will need to make sure you send your payment to HMRC so that they have sufficient time to present the cheque and for the funds to clear by the due date. This is effectively reducing the time available for preparing and submitting VAT returns and payments by as much as seven days.
Submit and pay electronically
Comment
This change by HMRC is probably to help cash flow and generate additional revenue from increased penalties. HMRC still require businesses using the, for example, Cash Accounting Scheme or the cash basis of the Flat Rate Scheme for Small Businesses to account for VAT on cheques on the day they are received.
This appears to be yet another attempt by HMRC to put more businesses into the penalty régime by moving the goal posts, whilst requiring the businesses to account for VAT on a less beneficial, for the business, way.
What are your views? Leave a comment below.
Chris Lodge, the manager of Kaslers’ road traffic accident department explains how new rules will affect simple injury claims from next year.
Getting it Right
A brand new streamlined process for dealing with
Road Traffic Accident injury claims.
After being injured in a road accident, the last thing anybody needs is long drawn out legal process. Fortunately, in the very near future, the waiting time for most of these cases is going to be dramatically shortened – if the lawmakers have finally got it right.
With effect from April 6th 2010, a completely new process for road accident injury claims becomes compulsory and where the insurer of the driver responsible for the accident admits liability immediately, the claim should normally be finalised in a matter of a few months.
Here’s how it works
Stage one
First, the injured person’s lawyer will have to email a very detailed Claim Notification Form to the insurers via a central website operated by the Ministry of Justice.
Once they have received the form, the insurers have only fifteen business days to state whether or not they accept liability. If they do AND comply with certain other time limits, the claim will be dealt with under the new procedure. The insurers will benefit because the legal costs they have to pay will be much reduced and the injured person will benefit from a far simpler and faster process.
Stage Two
If the injured person owns the car driven in the accident, then his or her lawyer will probably arrange for either the repairs, or an inspection and valuation if the vehicle is a write-off. As far as injuries are concerned, the lawyer will arrange to have the person assessed for treatment and an examination by an independent medical practitioner who will prepare a medical report in the format required by the new process. This will cover the extent of the injuries and their likely ongoing effects on such things as the ability to work and go about normal daily activities.
This medico-legal report, together with further details of the claim, must be emailed to the other driver’s insurers within fifteen business days of it being approved by the injured person.
The Final Settlement Pack
When the claim is ready to be settled, the lawyer must discuss and agree with the client the amount of compensation to be sought. Clearly, this must be a realistic figure based on the lawyer’s expertise in personal injury work. The compensation claim, together with a list of the injured person’s out of pocket expenses, will then be submitted electronically through the central website to the other driver’s insurers in the form of a Settlement Pack
The insurers then have a further fifteen business days either to agree the amount sought or make a counter offer. After that a further twenty business days are allowed to enable negotiations to continue.
The Interim Settlement Pack
If the medical report indicates that further medical evidence may be needed at a later date before the claim should be settled, the injured person’s lawyer should ask for a payment on account of the claim of £1000.00, which cannot be refused. (They can seek more than this where valid reasons are provided). The claims process is then put on hold until they can produce the final medical evidence at which point the Final Settlement process is followed.
What happens if the claim leaves the process?
If the insurers do not accept liability; do not comply with the time limits described above; deny that the symptoms referred to in the medical report were caused by the accident; or if they allege fraud, the claim leaves the new process and the matter is then handled by the current more lengthy and expensive process.
Generally, it will not be in the interest of insurers to allow the claim to leave the new process as the legal costs they will have to pay, if the claim succeeds, will be far greater.
What happens if the value of the claim cannot be agreed?
Stage 3
If no agreement about the value of the claim has been reached after the period allowed for negotiations has expired, it remains in the process, but the insurers must pay the value of their last offer and Court proceedings are then issued. These can take the form of an oral hearing, or (if both sides agree) by means of detailed written statements sent to the court so that the District Judge can value the claim.
Whilst the District Judge at the Court will be aware that settlement offers have been made by both sides, the amount of the final offers will be kept in a sealed envelope until after the amount to be awarded has been decided.
Getting it right here is very important because if the District Judge awards more than the insurer’s highest offer, the insurer must pay both side’s legal fees of the Stage 3 process, plus the court fees. However, if the amount awarded is less than that offered by the insurers in Stage 2, the injured person will be liable for the costs of both sides of the Stage 3 process. Plainly, it is essential that the injured person’s lawyer has ensured that they have adequate legal expenses insurance (legal protection) to cover them in case this happens and that the legal expenses insurers have agreed with the lawyer’s recommendation that the claim proceeds into Stage 3.
Getting the right advice
A single word of warning. Generally the new process will be far better for accident victims than the current one as both sides are both obliged and incentivised to proceed very quickly. However there is the risk that, because the legal fees will be so much lower, shortcuts may be taken by legal representatives. Their clients may even advised to accept offers well below the true value because lawyers will receive no additional payment for the extra work put in, or the additional time necessary to pursue claims through to their proper conclusions.
For more information, see the official website.
Chris Lodge has specialised as a Road Traffic Accident Solicitor for over 25 years and sits as a representative for the Motor Accident Solicitors Society on a Ministry of Justice working party testing and piloting the electronic notification form described above.
Got any questions or comments? I’d love to read them – use the comments section below.
For small businesses the Flat Rate Scheme (FRS) can be very useful as it simplifies the preparation of a business’s VAT return. Before you rush off to sign up for the FRS you should take a few moments to consider whether using the FRS will benefit your business. This scheme probably isn’t beneficial for businesses that apply the zero or reduced rate to most of their supplies.
How it works – in simple terms
You continue to raise invoices as normal, applying VAT at the appropriate rate. When you come to the end of the VAT period you use the total amount invoiced, i.e. the value plus the VAT, to work out how much VAT you owe to HMRC. You take this figure and apply the flat rate for your business. The answer is the amount of VAT you have to pay to HMRC.
What you don’t do is claim any VAT on general expenses as the flat rate has been set to take account of this. Where you make a major purchase you may be able to recover the VAT on the cost in addition to using the flat rate scheme. This only applies to capital items of more than £2,000.
Who cannot use the flat rate scheme?
The scheme cannot be used by businesses using:
- the Cash Accounting scheme – the FRS has its own cash accounting method.
- Retail schemes – the FRS has its own retail method.
- a margin scheme for second hand goods.
There are other reasons why a business might be excluded from the scheme. These are full details of these in HMRC’s guidance in Notice 733: Flat Rate Scheme for small businesses
Businesses that expect their turnover to exceed £150,000 (excluding VAT) in the coming twelve months aren’t allowed to join the scheme.
Should you use it?
The answer is: it depends! You need to weigh up what you would be paying to HMRC using the normal scheme and how much you would pay under the FRS. Many would expect to pay no more in VAT using the FRS or even paying less. Given the benefits, however, some might prefer to pay a little more as the savings in time and hassle might outweigh the cost of using the scheme.
HMRC very kindly provide a ready reckoner to help you work out whether you could benefit from using the scheme.
The biggest difficulty?
This would probably be deciding which flat rate to use. There is a table of the flat rates and the broad business area in the ready reckoner, and additional guidance to help you work out which description to use. It is important to get this right as if HMRC think you have got it wrong and paid too little VAT they’ll want to assess for the underpaid tax. Alternatively, if you set it too high and pay too much VAT, you are losing out.
Discount for new VAT registrations
Businesses in the first year of VAT registration get a 1% reduction on the flat rate they apply. This covers only the first year of the business’s VAT registration. If you are entitled to the discount there are two things to remember:
- Apply the lower rate until the end of the first year of the business’s VAT registration; and
- Apply the full rate after the end of the business’s first year of VAT registration.
Got a question on this article or just want to make a comment? Please leave it in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you.
Time limits they are a changing
I’ve got some good news and some bad news.
First the good news: for VAT the time in which you can make a claim for underclaimed VAT has been increasing to four years since 1 April 2009. This means that until 1 April 2010 you can put in a claim for underclaimed for periods that ended after 31 March 2006. Up to 1 April 2009 the time limit was three years.
Now the bad news: this means that errors where you’ve underpaid VAT also have a four year window within which they have to be adjusted. This means that HMRC can also assess for errors made in the four year period too!
Now the even worse news: for direct tax, e.g. income tax, the time limit for claims is reduced to four years. If you want to make a claim for tax before 1 April 2006 you need to make it before 1 April 2010. The silver lining is, of course, that HMRC won’t be able to assess for back tax if they don’t do it before 1 April 2010!
Do seek help from a professional adviser if you need to make a claim and might be affected by these changes.
