Our Expertise, Your Benefit
Why Use Us
The key question for our clients or the other advisors we work with to consider is “Why use us as Your Tax Partners?”
Getting the basics right
“If you get the basics right, everything else will fall into place”
In all areas of tax, there are routine reliefs, exemptions and allowances available. Yet so commonly, they are not utilised, often due to a lack of awareness.
Our detailed knowledge of the key tax legislation, in areas such as income, capital and corporate taxes, ensures that all opportunities are identified and utilised. This ensures we are able to provide a continuous stream of tax reducing ideas, in addition to the larger scale projects.
HMRC Tax incentives
“Never look a gift horse in the mouth”
HMRC seek to encourage certain decisions, behaviours or actions through the tax legislation. Whilst we would never advocate making decisions based purely on tax, it is important to understand and use these incentives wherever possible.
That might mean claiming the maximum capital allowances on a property development, claiming research and development allowances on a new production method, or incentivising your key team with tax efficient share options.
The key point is, if you don’t know what HMRC are encouraging through tax, then you may well be missing out. We make a point of knowing these incentives, ensuring that our clients and partners have the awareness to make fully informed decisions.
Thinking ahead
“The opportunity of a lifetime needs to be seized during the lifetime of the opportunity”
…ok, he may not have been referring directly to missed tax opportunities, but it certainly rings true!
It can be incredibly frustrating to learn that you could have saved tax if you had acted last week, or before you had sold an asset, or before you made an investment. Quite often, there is nothing that can be done after the event.
That’s why we will work with you to understand what key events or changes are on your personal or business horizon. This enables us to ensure that you are planned and ready, making full use of the available tax opportunities.
- Reinvesting capital gains into your own business to defer tax
- Transferring an asset to your business or spouse some time before a sale
- Restructuring your business prior to selling it
- Knowing whether to buy a rental property in your own name or via a company
- Structuring your wealth so you can efficiently pass value to your loved ones
- Planning the Stamp Duty consequences of a business restructure
Major Events
“Large scale change is grounded in small steps towards a big idea”
Some people or businesses may encounter major events on a regular basis. But for most of us, a major event will be a one-off, and more than likely life-changing. Failing to consider the tax implications before, during and after the event can leave a bitter taste.
We have guided many clients (along with their other professional advisers) in their ‘big events’, ensuring both that negative tax consequences are identified and planned for, and that positive tax consequences are seized upon.
This has ranged from:-
- A management buy-out enabling a former owner to, literally ‘sail off into the sunset’!
- The sale of a group for £120 million, where the former owner also passed life-changing bonuses to his 200 former employees.
- The merger of two successful property agencies into a single, major player in the Plymouth area.
- The sale of a traffic management company by two friends, who grew their business from nothing to being worth nearly £10 million in 15 years.
In all cases we ensure that “the tax tail does not wag the commercial dog” i.e. the tax is planned as part of the decision making process, rather than the decisions being based guided by tax.