Full time vs Self-Employed. Am I better off now?

Kokolot wrote: »

Hi there,

Thank you both.

I have an accountant but he hardly contacts me about my new situation. Rather I have to contact him, because this is my first experience I am not really sure what to expect from an accountant.

I think he gives me the necessary advice I have asked him so far, but he takes about two days to reply and maybe I was expecting more for paying £134 a month to an accountant.

so that is a reasonable rate for a Ltd company accounts (and a very good rate if it also includes a personal tax package). Why do you expect your accountant to reply instantly? They are not there to teach you, they gave you a package that includes some level of support, but it does not include teaching you. Read your contract with them and see what it says about asking for and receiving advice. We have over 900 one man consultancy companies in our practice and we could not possibly cope with hand holding on a daily basis. Yes we will sit down and explain the options if the client asks for it, but there comes a point where our time is charged over and above a package price.

Kokolot wrote: »

I must admit I am still puzzled by the expenses aspect in that I know I can claim expenses, but not sure how to pay myself back the expenses through my own company.

I am averaging around £900 a month in expenses mainly being hotel, subsistence, and mileage.

it is vital that you must understand a company is a separate legal entity to you. Until that is clear in your mind you will flounder.
You are merely an employee/officer of the company. It is the company who has the contracts with the clients and the company then employs you to do the work. As an employee you incur costs performing your work so you claim those costs from the company. The company may claim the costs from its clients ("recharges") or it may have included them in a fixed price day rate. Either way you as employee take money out of the company on presentation to the company of evidence of your costs ie. mileage claims, receipts for hotel bills, restaurant bills, etc. If you want to adopt the "proper" approach you simply add up all your receipts, write the total on a bit of paper, staple the receipts to the page and head the page Expenses claim, date: January 2018, employee name Kokolot

The company keeps those receipts to support the costs it records in its accounts to support its profit calculation. Of course in most one man bands they don't bother with an actual expense claim page. They just wang in the receipts to the accountants periodically and meantime take the money out as and when. That is fine as long as your accountant can tie the money going out directly to the receipts coming in, otherwise it looks like your (taxable) remuneration, not your expenses.

Appreciate than accountants deal with hundreds like you each year so will just process as they see fit based on experience. They won't necessarily instruct you how to operate unless your approach is so messy they have no idea what you are doing and need to "discipline" you to behave in a certain way. The accountants will however let you know (eventually) if the costs you are claiming from the company are not actually allowable costs that a company can pay its employees. Those sort of issues are why you employ an accountant to do Ltd Co accounts. Again if you want to know that up front then you need to check what level of advice your accountants will give without charging you for it. That said you'd have to be doing some pretty unusual things for your accountants not to be able to deal with you in their sleep.