Posted March 13, 2020

Do you Need to do a Tax Return?

Whitesides Accountant & Tax Advisor Sarah Greenwood answers “Do you Need to do a Tax Return?”

It depends.

If you’ve just got employment income, for example you’ve got three or four little part-time jobs, you don’t need to do a tax return because all your income is accounted under pay as you earn.

HMRC recently introduced something called the trading allowance, whereby, if you have an income of under £1000 a year from, for example, selling things on eBay or a market stall, you wouldn’t need to do a tax return.

If your income is over £1000 but your expenses are less than £1000, it might end up more tax efficient to apply the trading allowance against that income, rather than using your expenses.

Depending on what you’ve got to include on your tax return depends on how easy it will be to do yourself.

If you’ve just got some employment income and some dividends then it would be fairly easy to do your own tax return. However if you’ve got things like capital gains, overseas income or property income it can be more complicated.

For instance on property income, replacing things like a boiler would be an allowable cost but upgrading to a better kitchen would not be.

This means if you are doing the tax return yourself there are potentially areas where you could make errors.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing your own tax return and you’re not sure what to do, it’s always worth seeking professional help.

If you’ve got lots of other income like property or self-employment income or you’re a director of a business or perhaps have some investments, dividends or savings, you will need to do a tax return and register for self assessment.

The deadline for this is the 6th of October, following the end of the tax year.