As we slide into 2026, many people will be making their annual resolutions – things they’re determined to avoid repeating this year, or maybe things that they will finally get around to doing after having promised themselves that they were going to do them in 2025.
Allow me to prompt you with a resolution that your accountant will wish on your behalf. Please take a few hours now (no, not in a couple of weeks) to answer the letters from your tax accountant. The ones you’ve possibly been ignoring for the past few months.
As you might remember, January 31 is the usual deadline for submitting personal tax returns to HMRC. In fact, it’s not just the deadline for submission – you’re supposed to pay whatever is required by that date as well. And it’s not just personal tax (income tax) – a fair number of limited companies, those whose financial year ended on April 30 last year, must do the same.
There’s a very good reason why January is the least favourite month of the calendar in most accountancy practices: they’ll be working overtime trying to extract information from their clients to complete and submit returns by deadline day. Returns which they could comfortably have done back in August or September. Without any pressure, if only clients had provided them with the information that they were asking for at that time.
And it’s always the same clients! In most accountant’s offices there’ll already be a file of correspondence with copies of emails and letters that have gone to those clients over the last few months; requesting answers to questions, the newer ones will be almost begging for information. And many accountants will know that those requests will only be answered somewhere around the last few days of January.
And while we’re on that please remember that your tax accountant is one person to whom you should always be honest. Any questions that they ask you about your financial affairs will be the same ones that HMRC might well be asking them when they see your returns. If your accountant has to tell them that something is estimated or simply unknown, it’s a very sure way of putting your return onto a pile scheduled for further investigation. That’s not going to be very pleasant and will almost certainly be expensive.
I’d also urge you to make a second resolution: go and dig-out your insurance policy correspondence, even if it isn’t yet renewal time. In particular, read the sections which list the £s covered for specific assets: cash on the premises overnight, tobacco and alcohol stock, freezer cover, etc. You might be in for a shock. As we all know, product prices of almost all consumer goods keep rising; consequently, so does the value of sales transactions. While for years we’ve seen more and more spending being electronic, cash hasn’t disappeared altogether, and some observers even suggest that it may be making a comeback, of sorts.
Now some insurance companies and brokers are very good at updating the specific values of different categories of cover – although even those tend to work on rather general criteria, such as changes to RPI over the year, rather than on anything specific to a particular business. Other insurance providers take a rather lazy approach: it’s down to the policyholder, i.e. you, to check the documents at renewal and tell them whether the cover limits need to be revised.
How many people take the time to look at how that cover relates to what the business is doing now, not last year? Almost invariably, whenever I’ve sat down with business owners and gone through their insurance cover, we’ve suddenly realised that it’s nowhere near realistic for the actual values involved in their day-to-day trade. It’s better to check it now, rather than getting a nasty surprise if you are unfortunate enough to have to make a claim tomorrow.
- Jan Mikula represents nationwide franchise accounting company EKW Group – ekwgroup.co.uk