If there is one thing that benefitted from the COVID 19 lockdown it was the environment.
Less cars and other modes of transport made an appreciable impact.
Before lockdown the government had introduced incentives particularly relating to electric cars.
Some of these incentives differed in different parts of the UK, particularly in Scotland where more incentives are available and detailed below.
Electric Cars – 100% Allowances
The government in its drive for a greener environment provided what was known as enhanced capital allowances for electric cars. Cars whereby the CO2 emission is 50g/km or less.
These cars are entitled to 100% writing down allowance in the first year as opposed to 18% each year for non-compliant vehicles.
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In our previous private practice post we set out some points for you to consider as the lockdown eases and there is some return to normality. This is available on our website.
Independent Practitioner Today has also kindly published our pointers here.
Towards the end of the article we highlighted some tax planning opportunities and advice that will be set out below and for which further detailed guidance can be provided on a personal basis.
The tax planning will be split between those who practice as individual practitioners or in partnership say with their spouse or partner and those of you that have limited companies.
Sole Practitioner/Partnership
If you have a 31 March or 5 April financial year end then for the year 2020/21 the first part of the year will have seen little or no private practice activity.
The Revenue will allow the 31 July 2020 tax payment (your second payment on account for the tax year 2019/20) to be deferred until 31 January 2021.
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Many of you will have reflected over the past few weeks of the impact of COVID19 and the change to your practice in its everyday dealings with patients, staff and your own interactions.
The government has published some case studies of how various organisations within the NHS dealt with the pandemic and may assist you in your own COVID 19 debriefing.
Details of the various case studies published on 5 June 2020 can be found here
The general public, ourselves included, have been acutely aware from the news and government announcements of the number of individuals infected and sadly the number of people who have lost their life due to COVID. Little is heard of those that survive and what changes to their lives and care they will need following their recovery from the infection.
On the 5 June the government published guidance on the aftercare of inpatients recovering from the virus. Details can be found here.
Updated guidance (6 June 2020) on the management of staff and exposed patients or residents in health and social care settings has been published and is available here.
Finally, flow charts relating to symptomatic and asymptomatic workers return to work following a SARS-COV-2 test have been published and can be found here:
With the NHS and private hospitals triggering the de-escalation clause to allow some private work and NHS elective surgery, we take a look to the future from a financial perspective of how private practice can survive during the pandemic.
Income
Income for all practitioners has taken a huge hit in the last couple of months and will continue over the coming weeks.
New protocols to deal with patient consultations, investigations and procedures will mean less patients can be seen, investigated and operated on within the time span compared to pre COVID 19.
This means less income unless fees are reassessed upwards.
The private hospitals by way of the NHS block booking of their facilities effectively received a subsidy to assist them over the 3 month period that in most cases saw little use of their facilities.
The private hospitals will be acutely aware of the huge list of NHS patients needing treatment and will no doubt seek contracts to treat them for the NHS. This will provide an opportunity for additional private work but at what rates?
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Last week we released the first two of a series of training videos on how to use Xero.
Our Xero trainers have been busy and the next two videos are now available! The latest videos explain how to create bank rules and how to manually post purchase invoices.
Click here to see all of the training videos we have released so far
Next week we will release new videos which will explain how to create sales invoices and how to post purchase invoices from scanned documents, cutting down on data entry and saving space.
