I've recently passed my level 2 exam in manual book-keeping and computerised book-keeping whilst on maternity leave.
My husband's company is in it's 3rd year of trading - for Sage, do you have to set the company up from the date in which it was created therefore having the company's history available, or do you enter a different date for the financial year? We pay our corp tax in December but the company was set up in March so I'm not sure what To put for our financial year? Silly question I know!
Also for service invoices, I can't find where you can amend the VAT amount manually like you can with sales invoices? It appears fixed within the service invoice templates?
All basically depend on whether you want the history?
Many bookkeepers would simply enter the closing data of the previous filed year in order to move forwards from there but that will remove your ability to drill down.
Corporation tax is payable nine months and one day after the companies year end. (But best not to leave things to the last minute).
Because your companies year has been set up to coincide with the tax year you may be getting a little confused that they are the same thing where they are actually quite different things.
As you are now in year 3 you must have already filed a first set of accounts with companies house and hopefully you have those available.
Your second year does not sound as though its been prepared yet so it may be that you need to use the data from the first year as your closing balances for the year ended March 2013. Do all of 2013/14 to get this years figures for filing and to calculate the tax liability.
Then you are in year 3 (i.e. now) and processing information that would be current.
As you already have years 2 and 3 to enter if not too much happened in year 1 you may find it beneficial to simply redo everything from scratch but you must make sure that your data entry matches that already used to create your first set of accounts.
Worth noting here that as a company director your husband has a fiduciary duty to keep adequate records at all times as although you have specific filing dates HMRC can ask to inspect your books and records at any time and there can be quite heavy fines associated with failure to keep adequate books and records.
I note that you are only in the early stages of ICB and things like tax years are giving you grief so will you be using an accountant for accounts / tax / filing? If so they will be able to offer some help and guidance by telling you exactly what they need you to do for them (after all, helping you do the data entry the way that they want will make their life easier later).
I don't use Sage so I'll leave the Sage specific bits to others.
kind regards,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
We have filed our 1st year with CH and have the Unaudited Abbreviated Accounts to hand. The company was incorporated on the 19th March 2012.
Our 2nd year for the year ending March 2013 hasn't been done yet like you say, this will need to be paid December 2014. This is all with our accountant.
We are in year 3 from April 2014 onwards and are about to do our VAT return for the last quarter - our aim is for me to become confident to complete our own accounts and own VAT returns and for accountant to just pull together the end of year report. It has been a bit of a whirlwind as the first year or so we were moving house and adjusting to parenthood, but now that the IAB courses are behind me I'd like to really get involved with the company to take on as much as possible to reduce our expenditure with our accountant.
So going back to the question in hand, with the financial year in Sage, what would I enter? Do you need to have the history entered into Sage? I guess with such a small business it might not be necessary?
