The Fizz! Blog

It's not your *January* tax return!

The last tax year finished on Saturday, which means that those of us who have to do a Self Assessment Tax Return can do it any time from now on.  The ultimate deadline is 31 January, but that doesn't mean you have to do it in January!  There are loads of benefits to doing it as early as you can:

• You don't have to have it in the back of your mind. hanging over you
• You don't have to go around searching for stuff nine months after you received it
• You don't have to desperately try and remember what happened the best part of two years ago
• If you've got, tax, NI or student loan repayments to make, you know how much they'll be well in advance
• If you're due a refund you get it sooner
• If you're applying for a mortgage, you can get an SA302 from HMRC quickly if you need it
• Your accountant will love you and shower you with praise!

So don't think of it as a January return that you might do early.  It's an April return that you're going to get on to RIGHT NOW!

"Accounts are important to me"

Potential clients often tell us that accounts and tax are important things to them.  However, "Accounts are important to me", or similar, can mean one of two things:

1. "Accounts/tax/business and personal financial planning/etc are important to me"
2. "I know accounts/tax/business and personal financial planning/etc are supposed to be important to me, and my husband/wife/business coach/HR person/bank manager/author of the latest business book I'm reading has been nagging me about it, so here I am, but to be honest, either consciously or - more likely - subconsciously my heart's not really in it and accounts, tax and financial services generally aren't really things that I value deep down"

To be clear, both of those are completely reasonable positions to have - you can't force yourself to value something.  The problem for us is that we fit really well with the first type of client but not the second.  There are plenty of accountants who fit well with the second type but not the first, and they're really happy to meet type twos.  But the screening process - finding out if you're meeting with a type 1 or type 2 - can be really tricky, since they both present themselves in pretty much the same way.

We think we're quite good at identifying the signs, but sometimes we get it wrong.  Early in the year we probably spent a half day meeting with someone, who we liked and thought we could be really valuable to, and coming up with a pretty detailed set of recommendations and a fee proposal.  Then we were just completely blanked by him.  If you want to know how someone really feels about something, then it's what they do that's important, not what they say.  In this case we'd say that, though that person might have really been trying his best to engage with the financial side of the business, and convince himself it was important, deep down he just felt that what we do (and by extension our time) is of minimal value.  So we didn't do a good job of screening him, and not only did he waste our time, but we wasted his too.

It's something that's in no way limited to our profession - whatever business you're in, it's better to identify people who value what you do and work with them, rather than try and talk people round who underneath it all really don't care.  Filtering the second type out is something that most of us in business could probably be a bit better at.

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