PAH Accountants

Many businesses ask what are the most important things they need to know about Intellectual Property so here goes:-

1 – If you have an idea or invention DO NOT TELL ANYONE

To be protectable by patent a new invention must be novel and inventive. As soon as you tell someone you have destroyed the novelty and hence made your invention un-patentable. If you do need to discuss your idea make sure you do it under the cover of a Non-Disclosure or

The best way to the performance of your business is to use some key accounting ratios. These help you to analyse financial information about your business. Having this knowledge will aid making informed decisions about how to manage your business and help it to grow. This article highlights some of the common ratios that a business should use to measure its performance.

Profitability ratios

There are many factors to consider when looking at how profitable a business is. The profit and loss account shows

Session one – the trading account

The goal of most people who set up a business is to make money. To earn a profit is to receive more money from sales than you are paying out for expenses. Profit is effectively the reward earned when taking the risk of owning a business. The Profit and Loss account is a record of the performance of a business over a specific period of time, usually annually.

The first key element of the profit and loss account is what is known as the trading account. This

On 14 October 2010 the Government published its latest proposed amendments to our pension legislation and as is invariably the case what The Government gives in one hand they invariably take away in another. What’s important is does this affect you now and in the future?

Here is a summary of the changes;

• The lifetime allowance i.e. the maximum size of your pension fund at retirement will be reduced from £1.8 million

PAH Accounting have added a great new feature to its website. As part of the resource section (see the tabs across the top, there is some great stuff ) there is now a tab for events.

Phil Hendy, the principal of PAH Accounting often attends local networking groups, business training/ seminars as well as the odd social event!

Bookmark the page and keep an eye out to the list of the hottest events for small businesses.

If you are running an event that you feel may be useful to small businesses, particularly if they are local to Wiltshire, send over the details and I will consider adding it to the page.

Class 2 National insurance is payable by sole traders and usually a small weekly/ monthly amount.

From April 2011, the way in which Class 2 NIC is payable will be changing. It will now match the self assessment dates of 31 January and 31 July. Only two bills per year will therefore

It has been announced by Companies House that virtually all of their services are to be online by March 2013. Indeed their vision is to become a fully electronic registry.

Much of the Companies House forms have been available to file using the WebFiling service for quite a while now. You should have been given an

Your accountant will often produce a set of accounts that include a balance sheet. But what exactly is this? It is a common misconception that the profit is the only factor you need to worry about.

Actually the balance sheet is very important. It provides a summarised snapshot of the business assets and liabilities at a particular date in time. Whilst not necessarily an accurate way of valuing a business it can be a very

The taxman joined twitter just before xmas and I’d encourage fellow tweeters, whether taxpayers or accountants, to follow twitter.com/hmrcgovuk (and by all means follow @TheTaxBuzz too!)

HMRC’s twitter policy statement says that if you follow this account, you can expect 1-2 tweets

After telling clients and contacts to go and join the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), I have finally got around to joining this myself.

The Federation started in 1974 as a lobbying group that protects the interests of small business owners as well as the self-employed. It now has over 213,000 members