Don’t scream at me, but now the Tax Year in the UK has ended, you really should start preparing for your Tax Return if you do one. They say there are two things you cannot avoid in life - Death and Taxes! Even if you don’t normally have to do a tax return, it is still wise to do a check on your income and expenditure to see if your tax codes is still correct and you don’t have unexpected changes in income which may mean you have either paid too much or too little tax.
I will do a more in-depth feature on tax codes at a later date to help people to understand them. In the mean time, to prepare for your annual tax returns you should find the following items:
Payslips for each month/job you have had during the year - even if they are electronic, download them and save them somewhere you can find them.
Check which jobs you are still employed at, and find out when you will get your P60. This is an imporant document - do not loose it! You may also get other documents from work if you have a car or expenses paid to you.
Go through your bank statements, and check all the income you have coming in - make sure you can account for it - this includes benefits and interest. Your bank should provide a statement of annual interest and any tax they deducted a few months after the end of April.
Have a glass of wine or beer.. and breath
Find a pretty folder or box to keep all your financial information in. If you have your P60, and it all matches up, you don’t really need to keep more than one year of your payslips if they are paperbased. Keep this based on tax year to make it simple.
Check you can log-onto the website to make your return, you may need to ask for the login details if you have lost them, so the sooner you do this the better. Find or download last years return so you can see what you entered on that. Usually you should have the same items to enter. Find any charity donations if you have said they can claim tax, think about your pension payments, who makes those? Do you have any membershiops you need to be able to work such as registrations with accounting bodies, legal bodies etc, or uniforms you have to maintain?
Now wait, wait until you get all your P60’s and interest payments together, then do your return immediately.
If you do it immediately without waiting and putting it off, you will feel so much better an can boast about this to your friends. This also means that if you have tax to be repaid, you can get this sooner than the deadline, you can also get help with questions or queries, the Inalnd Revenue don’t bite - call them if you have a question, they are very helpful. Good Luck!