Maslins January 2010 Newsletter
Deadline - Personal Tax Returns 31 January
If you're one of those people who leave things until the last minute, it's time you started to think about completing your self assessment tax return for the year ended 5 April 2009.
If you'd like us to assist, please don't give us the info in the last week of January, or the response you get may not be that professional!
Opportunity Discipline
One of the keys to the success of a small business is its ability to spot and (just as importantly) take advantage of any opportunities that arise.
Key skills to enable you to do this are:
- The ability to spot things you did that were a success, and know when it's appropriate to repeat them
- The ability to gain experience from failures, and not repeat them
- The ability to imagine future opportunities that don't yet exist as though they are real
It is a simple state of mind, but one of the most important factors to long term success is our own perception of failures. You learn far more from your mistakes than your successes, and every business has its ups and downs. When things go wrong, it is important to try to work out why, and make a note to act differently in the future, but you should not dwell on it beyond that.
Opportunity discipline is all about spotting profitable gaps in the market, and finding out a way to exploit them.
- What changes are happening in your industry? - Where is the market going? Are you well situated to cope with that change when it happens? Could you make the change happen sooner and be at the forefront of the new improved industry?
- How can you reposition your business within the market? - Can you attack the market from a different angle? Is there another way you could offer your services which none of your competitors (or yourself) are currently doing?
- Can you offer a similar service for lower cost? - Take a look at your costs on a line by line basis. Could you cut back on any of them without severely harming the service your clients receive?
- What can you add to your own/competitors product that customers want? - Are there any additional bolt on services you can offer that will benefit customers without costing you the earth?
- What would your customers ideally like if it were available? - Why isn't it available? Could you feasibly offer it?
- What have you done in the past that's worked well? - Can you do it again? Perhaps you might need to change/modernise your offering, but if it's worked before it will often work again.
- Have you made mistakes that you haven't corrected? - If you've previously been made aware of some way your offering was flawed, did you rectify it? If you apologised, but continued in the same manner as "that's the way I've always done things", could you perhaps change now?
Considering all of the above will hopefully spark a couple of ideas that can lead to the future improvement of your business. He who stands still will not get very far.
Tax tip of the month
VAT on cars
Following last month's general guide to car expenditure, I thought it worth giving a specific mention to VAT.
As a basic guide, VAT on cars can only be reclaimed if you are a taxi driver or run a hire car business. Otherwise HMRC will not accept that it is bought purely for business, and they tend to have a general hatred of cars anyway.
If you buy a new (or occasionally also second hand) car, the dealer will typically try to up-sell you on a large number of optional accessories from satnavs to CD multichangers. If you buy these as part of the same purchase as the car itself, the input VAT will be irrecoverable along with the car.
If, on the other hand, you buy a few accessories separately to the purchase of the car, any input VAT is completely recoverable. So the moral of the story is to buy your car related gadgets completely separately to your car purchase if it's feasible to do so.
As an aside, HMRC rules are far more lenient for vans, as they accept many tradesmen/similar buy vans because they need to carry around lots of tools that the boot of a car couldn't cope with.
Maslins Newsletters
Due to inevitable time constraints in late January (see deadlines above to understand why!), we have decided not to have a February newsletter.
