What about dividends?

Unlike your salary, NICs are not applied to dividends. Dividend tax rates have the same bands as income tax, but different tax rates for each band.

The tax rates payable on dividends are as follows for 2023/4:

– Personal Allowance (up to £12,570) – tax-free

– Basic Rate (£12,571 to £50,270) – 8.75%

– Higher Rate (£50,271 – £125,140) – 33.75%

– Additional Rate (over £125,140) – 39.35%

Importantly, your salary (and other additional income) will use up your Personal Allowance first, before dividends are taxed.

If you have any questions about any of the above or you’d like your limited company to pay you more in salary, then speak directly to Jacqui.

• Avoid any unnecessary charges for finance – you can lose hundreds, even thousands, of pounds each year by going over your business credit card limit and being late with loan repayments. By staying on top of bills and paying them on time, you can avoid such interest charges. Keep a schedule and set up alerts to remind you when payments are due, automating as much of this process as you can.

• Tap into business funding – do you know what funding is available out there and what is appropriate for your business? When looking into this, you need to consider what assets you have available to back the funding as you will be asked this. For example, you may qualify for small-business rate relief on your property.

• Digital payments – are you making it easy for your customers to pay you by making digital payments available to them e.g., Stripe or Go Cardless?

• Focus – are you focusing enough time on your business to drive sales and generate growth – think about outsourcing your payroll as this can be quite time consuming at the end of every month. Outsourcing will free up some of your valuable time. Again, we can help with this.

• Future-proofing your business – in volatile times like now do you have a `business risk register’ to help you anticipate and overcome challenges with confidence? For example, what if your costs go up by 10% in your key product lines or your business funding gets squeezed even further – think about what’s going to hurt your business as well as what’s going to kill it and have a plan in place so that you don’t have to react in the moment and risk making costly last-minute decisions.

• Making Tax Digital – perhaps now is the time for you to go fully digital in terms of how you provide your company data to us so that we can use that to give you an insight into cash flow forecasting to help your business (we are able to offer this via QuickBooks) as well as to provide you with analytics to help you make informed business decisions going forward. Speak to us about going fully digital.