Jet Accountancy

What is it?  The Marriage Allowance lets you transfer £1,150 of your Personal Allowance to your husband, wife or civil partner if they earn more than you,

This reduces their tax by up to £230 in the tax year.

To benefit as a couple, you (as the lower earner) must have an income of £11,500 or less.

You can backdate your claim to include any tax year since 5 April 2015 that you were eligible for Marriage Allowance.

Who can get it? This is the most important factor as only people with these specific circumstances will be able to apply:

• You’re married or in a civil partnership.
• One of you needs to be a non-taxpayer, which usually just means earning less than the £11,500 personal allowance.
• The other needs to be a basic 20% rate taxpayer (higher or additional-rate taxpayers aren’t eligible for this allowance). This means you’d normally need to earn less than £45,000.
• You both must have been born on or after 6 April 1935.  If not, you may be eligible for Married Couple’s Allowance.
• New. A rule that came into effect from Wednesday 29 November 2017 allows you to claim even if your partner has died since April 2015 and all the other criteria above apply.

It won’t affect your application for Marriage Allowance if you or your partner are currently receiving a pension or living abroad.

In most cases, the allowance will be given by adjusting the recipient partner’s personal tax code. The partner who transferred their personal allowance will also receive a new tax code, if employed. If the recipient partner is in self-assessment, it will reduce their self-assessment bill.

Already applied in the last tax year? You’ll automatically get the marriage tax allowance this year and only need to inform HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) if your circumstances have changed making you no longer eligible.

For further information on this or if you wish us to apply on your behalf, please do not hesitate to contact us on 01366 858538 or email info@jetaccountancy,co.uk.

The cost of an annual staff party is allowed as a deduction for tax purposes. However, the cost is only deductible if it relates to employees and their guests, which would include directors in the case of a company, but not sole traders and partners in the case of unincorporated organisations.

As a company director, you are entitled to provide an annual event for yourself, any staff you employ, and your partner, and reclaim the costs against the company, as long as the cost per head does not exceed £150 (including VAT).

The cost per head can include accommodation, transport, and food and drink – but must not exceed the £150 threshold.

You may decide to hold several events throughout the year, but the total claim for all events must not exceed this threshold.

To calculate the cost per head, HMRC states that you should ‘divide the total cost of each function by the total number of people (including non-employees) who attend in order to arrive at the cost per head.

Furthermore, an employer may provide employees with a seasonal gift, such as a turkey, bottle of wine or a box of chocolates at Christmas. All of these gifts are considered to be trivial and as such are not taxable.

One cautionary regarding VAT and staff gifts is that VAT is chargeable by the employer when an employee receives gifts totalling more than £50 in a year.

Every employer has automatic enrolment duties. They need to assess their staff, put them into a workplace pension scheme if they meet certain criteria, write to them to tell them what they have done, and complete and submit a declaration of compliance with The Pensions Regulator (TPR).

To date, more than 8 million people have been automatically enrolled in a workplace pension by more than 600,000 employers. And with hundreds of thousands more employers due to reach their duties start date by February 2018, the number of people automatically enrolled will continue to rise.

However, an employer’s workplace pension duties do not stop with declaring compliance. And with TPR conducting stop checks on employers across the country to make sure they are complying with their duties, it is important you are aware what needs to be done on a regular and ongoing basis to ensure you comply with the law.

What are your ongoing duties?

You will need to pay regular contributions into your chosen pension, monitor the age and earnings of your staff and enrol eligible staff, process any requests to join or leave the scheme, keep and maintain accurate records. You will also need to re-enrol eligible staff into an automatic enrolment pension scheme every three years.

We can take the whole burden of auto enrolment off your shoulders.  We offer a fixed fee Auto Enrolment Service as an add-on to our fixed fee Payroll Services.  We can take care of the setting up and the ongoing administrative burden, ensuring that your business complies with the new regulations.  Contact us on 01366 858538 for more information.