Charities with income over £10,000 pa are required to file their trustees' annual report and accounts within 10 months of the year end. Most send these in by post, they are then scanned and posted in the public area of the Charity Commisison website. One problem with this is that your signatures are then on a website and there are some bad people about who might take advantage of this.

A better thing to do is to file online. You simply need to have your accounts in pdf format. Even though these are not signed, they are acceptable. 

For any CA Plus clients, just ask us and we can send you a pdf version by email once the accounts have been signed off.

The community accounting world has an annual party (sorry, I mean 'conference') once a year.

Click here for a link to the national site.

Companies House has announced new penalties for companies who are late filing their financial accounts.  This will apply to such groups who are incorporated either as a Company by Guarantee, a Community Interest Company or the anticipated Charitable Incorporated Organisation.

The new penalties (as from 1st February 2009) are:

£150 for accounts, up to one month late

£375 for accounts,  one to three months late

£750 for accounts, three to six months late

£1500 for accounts, over six months late

Also, if accounts are filed late in two successive financial years they incur DOUBLE penalties!!!

If you ever wondered why you might need help from CA Plus with your accounts, this is it!!

The Big Lottery are currently undertaking a consultation excercise. The results of this could have a huge impact on our sector. Specifically, there is a question about possibly removing the current commitment on the percentage of funding to the voluntary sector - opening the door for funding more alternatives.

To complete the consultation takes about 10 minutes - we'd strongly encourage you to have your say.

Click here for a link to the consultation.

We're in the process of sorting out our work shcedules for 2009/10. If you haven't already sorted out your independent examination of accounts give us a call soon.

We've also introduced a great incentive for our payroll clients - if a new groups begin to use the service as a result of your own recommendation, we'll reduce your next invoice by £50. Just contact us to find out more

Trying to determine if a new worker is employed or self-employed is often a big problem. HMRC have issued a new fact sheet to replace the old IR56.

In the fact sheet, HMRC now indicate that their online "Employment Status Indicator (ESI)" does provide a definite view for employers and any result from the ESI will be binding on HMRC (providing the information supplied by the employer is correct in the first place).

The new HMRC fact sheet can be viewed here

The online HMRC Employment Status Indicator can be viewed here here

The capped statutory weekly pay for redundancy calculations and some Employment Tribunal Awards is set to rise.

The current capped weekly pay figure of £330 is to rise to £350 for redundancy dismissals as of 1st February 2009.

Just a little reminder that the standard rate for VAT has changed today (1st December 2008) from 17.5% to 15%.

If you account for VAT, you'll need to edit your software to the new rate today. HMRC has sent guidance to all VAT registered organisations.

Here is a link to the HMRC guidance

At our recent AGM, we presented a brief outline of the changes for charities around accounts, independent examinaitons and the CIO - a new legal form for charities that is on the horizon.

You can click on the links here to see copies of the notes that accompanied the presentations