Help with company tax return

A question about : Help with company tax return

Hi, I have been running a very small limited company for just over a year and have now received the dreaded letter saying I need to file my annual tax return. I've been keeping my accounts using Excel but how do I go about filing them online with HMRC and Companies House and working out the tax I need to pay?

I keep going through HMRC website but it's so confusing and am now looking at online accountants but they would charge my whole year's profit!!

Any advice very gratefully received.

Best answers:

• Try some local accountants. If your company is straightforward then you'd be surprised how cheap it could be.
• Having your accounts set up in Excel is a real plus - most accounting packages will pull in your spreadsheet with a bit of work, saving quite a lot of extra data input.
  You could file your own Companies House returns, it is fairly easy, plus your Self Assessment, again with a bit of reading it is fairly easy.
  Corporation Tax I found a little more tricky and asked an accountant to sort for me.
  This year we are working with Quickfile online as a (hopefully) fairly cheap way of filing the accounts. Maybe worth a look?
  https://www.quickfile.co.uk/
  Just wondering how much you have been quoted so far, would expect local accountants to charge Ј400 ish for small well prepared job.
• My year-end typically costs me Ј1200+VAT between 2 limited companies (one simplistic, one fairly straight forward). It's a far bigger deal than personal tax and you'll have a lot of questions.
• Quick look around the web and plenty of accounting companies charge reasonable rates for small ltd's.
  For ex Ј249, prob plus vat (doesn't say), for small company accounts.
• Thank you very much for your help. I only made approx Ј350 last year so not too keen on the idea of spending most of that on an accountant! I'll have a good read through the links you suggested and see if I can get my head around it all.
  Thanks again
• Better to pay an accountant than to have to pay fines etc to HMRC because you've done it wrong. I've been running a limited company for 4 years, and there's no way I would contemplate doing the end of year books myself.
  Not much use for you, but it would be better to have had an accountant from the beginning, and to factor their fees in to your overall costings when writing your business plan.
  As things stand at the moment, I would use an accountant and chalk it up to experience. Very few small businesses make a profit in the first year anyway. I've always found that our accountant saves us more than they cost us (we pay about Ј1800 + VAT pa).
• Do you expect this to be the level of profit you make going forward? It may be better to close the ltd company and go sole trader for future years.