Tax advice and planning that helps you pay a fair amount, plan ahead and avoid nasty surprises.

It sits outside a compliance fee and is quoted separately, either as a fixed fee for a piece of work or built into an ongoing advisory arrangement. You get the figure before anything starts. The separation is deliberate: preparing and filing a return is a known annual job, whereas planning a profit extraction strategy, an exit or a group restructure is not, and pricing them together means everyone pays for work most will never use. Where a planning idea will not save more than it costs, we say so rather than bill for the analysis and let you conclude it yourself.

Planning uses reliefs and structures in the way Parliament intended — pension contributions, capital allowances, the timing of income and expenditure, choosing the right business structure, using both spouses' allowances. Avoidance schemes use arrangements that technically comply while producing an outcome nobody legislated for, and they are attacked through the general anti-abuse rule, DOTAS disclosure, follower notices and accelerated payment notices. We do the first and not the second. If someone offers a scheme promising to turn income into a tax-free loan or a capital gain, assume it will be challenged and that you, not the promoter, will pay.

Before the transaction, not after — which sounds obvious and is the single most expensive mistake we see. Once a company is sold, a property transferred, a dividend paid or a year ended, the options collapse to reporting what happened. Practical timings: three to four months before a company year end for extraction and capital spend; at least a full tax year before a business sale for Business Asset Disposal Relief conditions; before a property is bought rather than after, because moving it later triggers Capital Gains Tax and Stamp Duty. The cheapest planning is a phone call in month nine.

No, and be wary of anyone who does. In plenty of cases the current position is already reasonable and the honest finding is that there is nothing material to change — that is a legitimate outcome of the work, not a failure of it. Where savings do exist they usually come from unglamorous places: the salary and dividend split, pension contributions, capital allowances timed properly, using a spouse's allowances and bands, and the choice of business structure. Those are worth real money over years. Anything promising a dramatic one-off saving deserves a hard look at who is being paid for it.

We take over the correspondence and you stop dealing with HMRC directly. That means reading the opening letter carefully — what is actually being asked for is usually narrower than it reads — agreeing what to provide and what to challenge, requesting extensions where a statutory deadline is tight, and keeping a written record of everything sent. Most enquiries are aspect enquiries into a single figure rather than a full books-and-records review, and many close without a change. Whether enquiry work sits inside your fee or is quoted separately depends on your engagement letter, so ask before you need it.

That depends on your structure, but the discipline matters more than the percentage. A sole trader should reserve for income tax and Class 4 National Insurance on profit, plus VAT if registered, and remember payments on account — in the first full year, January brings the previous year's tax and half of the next year's again on the same day. A company should reserve Corporation Tax as profits are earned, payable nine months and a day after the year end. Move it to a separate account the day the money lands. Tax reserves spent by accident are the most common cash crisis we see.

We will tell you honestly whether you have a claim, and the honest answer is often no. R&D relief requires an advance in science or technology with genuine technical uncertainty — not a new website, a bespoke customer system or a product that is simply new to your market. HMRC has substantially tightened enforcement after widespread abuse by claims firms, with mandatory pre-notification, detailed additional information forms and a high rate of enquiry. Where a claim is genuine, it is valuable and worth doing properly with contemporaneous records. Where it is marginal, the enquiry risk usually outweighs the benefit.