Happy Accountant: Accounting Blog & Online Accountant

* If your turnover is above the VAT threshold, you must register. If all of your customers are VAT registered, you may wish to consider registering, even if you are below the threshold, so that you can reclaim your input VAT (the VAT on your purchases).  Registering for VAT will have no effect on your [read more]

*VAT is a tax on consumer spending.  Under the system, every VAT registered business is effectively a tax collector. Most transactions are standard rated (currently at 17.5% in the UK at the time of writing).  However, transactions could also be zero-rated, exempt or outside the scope of VAT. A VAT registered business has to pay [read more]

*A while ago, I was contacted by a company claiming to be acting on behalf of a voluntary organisation, selling advertisements on a wall calendar. In short, it turned out to be a scam, which works something like this: The first person rings you up with a sales pitch, possibly opening by asking if you would like [read more]

*The following may help you to decide which method to use.  However, these are only a guide. When to use Single Entry accounting your accounting transaction volume is relatively low you are willing to pay an accountant to draw up your accounts and/or complete your tax return at the year end you are using a manual system [read more]

* Double entry bookkeeping is harder to understand (worringly, there are fully qualified accountants who don’t “get it”, although they are in a minority – I hope) It follows, then that, if you don’t already have the accounting know-how, you’ll either have to learn or hire/outsource someone to do it for you. If you don’t [read more]

*Double Entry Bookkeeping dates back to Venice, 1494.  As it’s name suggests, it means that every transaction is entered twice into the “books” of a business.  Once as a debit and once as a credit. (How this works in detail will be the subject of a later post) It provides a specific means of dealing [read more]

*Single entry bookkeeping involves recording a transaction once.  For example, if a business’s records involved just recording cash coming in and going out of the company in a cash book, that would be single entry bookkeeping. The Advantages of Single Entry Bookkeeping are that it’s simple to understand.  It’s quite intuitive to record transactions in [read more]