Accounting for construction & trades.

You get a fixed monthly figure in writing after a 30-minute discovery call. For construction the drivers are the number of subcontractors under CIS, whether you are VAT registered, payroll headcount, and how the paperwork arrives — a phone full of photographed receipts is a very different job from a carrier bag in December. There is no sector premium: the fee reflects the work, not the trade. FreeAgent is included, worth up to £330 a year, and there is no hourly charge for ringing up with a question mid-job.

For most construction services between VAT-registered businesses inside the CIS chain, the customer accounts for the VAT rather than the supplier charging it. As a subcontractor you invoice without VAT and state that the reverse charge applies; as a contractor you account for it on your own return. It does not apply to end users, to supplies of materials alone, or where the customer is not VAT and CIS registered. The cash effect was significant for subcontractors, because VAT no longer sits in the account between quarters — money some businesses had been using as working capital.

That depends on the reality of the arrangement, not on whether they invoice you or hold a UTR. The tests are the familiar ones: control over how and when the work is done, whether they can send a substitute, who provides materials and plant, and whether they carry financial risk on their own work. If HMRC reclassifies someone as an employee, the contractor picks up the PAYE and National Insurance that should have been deducted, plus interest and penalties. It is a far cheaper conversation before the engagement than after a compliance visit.

By treating them as a debtor with a date rather than money that turns up eventually. Retention is typically held until practical completion and then partly until the defects period ends, which can be a year or more after you did the work — so it belongs in a forecast, tracked job by job, with a chasing process attached. The other half of the fix is timing: materials bought up front against staged payments received in arrears creates a funding gap on every job. That gap is predictable, which means it can be planned for or financed deliberately.

Vans and plant generally qualify for capital allowances, and a van is treated far more favourably than a car both for capital allowances and as a benefit in kind. Tools, safety equipment, protective clothing and branded workwear are allowable; everyday clothing is not. Travel is the area that generates most disputes: journeys from home to a site that has become your normal place of work are commuting, not business travel, and a long-running site can quietly become exactly that. Keep a mileage log with dates, sites and purpose.

Only job-level costing will tell you, and most trades businesses do not have it. A profit and loss shows whether the year was good; it does not show that the extension you quoted at £42,000 cost £39,000 to deliver because of two variations nobody invoiced. Tracking labour, materials, plant and subcontractor cost against each job is what turns a busy year into a profitable one. It is also what lets you quote the next job from evidence rather than instinct. See management accounts.