During the lockdown many of you with limited companies may have resorted to withdrawing funds from your company bank accounts over and above any normal salary and/or dividend payment taken in the past. This may have been withdrawn as a loan as opposed to a salary or dividend payment.
Below is a guide to help explain the consequences of taking a ‘loan’ from your company and what is known as the Director’s Loan Account ("DLA").
Although your company is owned and controlled by you, legally and for tax purposes it is a separate legal entity. This is important and it is because of this separate legal status and the control you exert over it that HMRC has safeguards to ensure that the funds held and owned by the company are afforded safeguards.
The Revenue pays particular attention to the DLA.
A DLA can sometimes be referred to as a Directors Current Account ('DCA'). This directors loan/current account represents monies owing to you or monies owing back to the company from you. If you borrow money from your company (instead of say declaring a dividend) then assuming the company didn't already owe the same amount of money to you, then this would show within your company accounts as a directors loan account.
Financial year end
When it comes to the financial year end an account is drawn up internally within the More...
Following on from our newsletter of 29 July 2020 highlighting barcoding as a quick and efficient method of administering flu clinics Public Health England on 5 August 2020 published updated details of the national flu immunisation programme for 2020/21.
Details of the programme can be found here.
The salient points to note are:
Flu vaccinations, subject to contractual negotiations, will additionally be offered to:
- Household contacts of those on the NHS Shielded Patient List. Specifically, those sharing accommodation on most days over the winter where close contact is unavoidable.
- Children of school Year 7 age in secondary schools (aged 11 on 31 August 2020).
- Health and social care workers. This should be provided by their employer.
- Subject to vaccine supply 50 to 64-year-old group phased over November and December.
An inactivated vaccine may be offered to children whose parents refuse live attenuated influenza vaccine.
More...
One of our partners Ian Tongue is a regular contributor to Independent Practitioner and this month he covers 10 Financial Considerations for Succeeding in Private Practice in light of COVID19.
You can read his full article here
Remember, if you haven't paid your 31 July 2020 tax payment yet, you do not need to make payment until 31 January 2021. HMRC have been sending out the usual 31 July 2020 payment slips but have automatically changed the due date for payment to 31 January 2021.
If you would like to discuss your private practice please feel free to contact us
Cashflow is important for any business and for a GP Practice it can be vital when looking at Drawings Projections or simply planning the day to day finances of the practice.
Float is an online tool that links with Xero and can be used to forecast the cashflow of your practice. It can be pre-populated with your data and has proved invaluable for some of our GP Practices. You can also run multiple scenarios to see the impact of making different business choices on your practice cashflow. In our video below we explain Float in more detail.
The Annual Allowance is a complicated topic but here at Sandison Easson we have spent years understanding how the growth arises in the NHS Pension Scheme for Annual Allowance purposes. If you need any assistance planning to make the most of your Annual Allowances or preparing your Tax Return and/or Scheme Pays Elections then please get in touch.
Changes from April 2020 - Click here to watch our latest Annual Allowance webinar
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.
More...
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?
More...
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.
