Accountants for
Sole Traders

No. Unlike a limited company you do not file accounts at Companies House and there is no public record of your figures. Your only legal obligation is to report the right numbers on your Self Assessment return and keep records to support them for at least five years after the filing deadline.

That said, most sole traders benefit from proper accounts anyway — for mortgage applications, for planning, and because it is much harder to spot a problem in a list of bank transactions.

There is no single profit figure where it always makes sense, but the question becomes worth asking somewhere around the point where your profits comfortably exceed what you need to draw for living costs. Above that, retaining profit in a company and drawing a mix of salary and dividends can be more tax-efficient.

It is not purely a tax decision though. A company means Companies House filings, public accounts, director responsibilities and more administration. We will model both and give you an honest view, including when the answer is to stay as you are.

Enough to show how you arrived at the figures on your return: sales invoices, purchase receipts, bank statements, mileage logs, and records of any goods you took for personal use. Digital copies are fine and HMRC accepts photographs of receipts.

Keep them for five years after the 31 January filing deadline for that tax year. Under Making Tax Digital the records will need to be kept digitally, which is one reason we set clients up on software early.

Yes. There are two approaches. The simplified flat rate gives you a fixed monthly amount based on hours worked from home, which needs no receipts and suits most people. Alternatively you can apportion actual costs — rent or mortgage interest, council tax, utilities, insurance — by the number of rooms used and the time they are used for business.

The apportioned method usually gives a larger claim but requires records. We work out which is better for you rather than defaulting to the easy one.

When your taxable turnover exceeds £90,000 in any rolling twelve-month period, or when you expect to exceed it in the next thirty days alone. The rolling test is the one people miss — it is not measured against your accounting year or the tax year.

You must register within thirty days of the month in which you crossed the threshold. Registering late means paying the VAT you should have charged, whether or not you actually collected it from customers.

Sometimes. If your customers are VAT-registered businesses, they reclaim whatever you charge, so registering lets you recover VAT on your own costs at no real cost to them. If you sell mainly to the public, registering voluntarily means either raising prices by 20% or absorbing it.

The other consideration is admin: quarterly returns and digital records are an ongoing commitment. We will tell you honestly if it is not worth it yet.