Our Blog

Choosing the right business structure is crucial for your enterprise's success and tax efficiency. While many entrepreneurs start as sole traders due to its simplicity, there comes a point when incorporating as a limited company might be more beneficial. Let's explore the key differences and help you identify when to make the switch.

If you run a limited company, there’s a job on your list you might not know about.

Companies House now has to check who you are. Every director. Every person with significant control. That is effectively every company client we look after.

The 12 month transition period ends on 18 November 2026, and that date has been all over the accounting press for months.

Here is the problem with that. For most of my clients, 18 November is not the deadline at all. Theirs is earlier.

This one is short and it is urgent, so I’ll get straight to it.

The temporary 5% VAT rate on children’s meals, children’s tickets and family attractions ended on 1 September 2026. Everything it covered went back to 20% the next day.

If your till, your booking system or your bookkeeping software is still set to 5%, you are not saving anyone money. You are collecting 5% and you owe HMRC 20%, and the 15% gap comes out of your own pocket. On a summer’s worth of trade that is not a rounding error.

A short one this week, and a slightly self-indulgent one, so I will keep it brief.

MCC Partners is through to the finals of the Gravesham Business Awards 2026. We are one of 33 businesses from across the borough that put an entry in this year, and we are genuinely pleased to be in among them.

We do not normally write about ourselves here. The blog is usually a VAT threshold or a director’s loan account, and it will be back to that next week. But this one felt worth marking, mostly because of who else is on the list.

This is the part almost nobody asks about before signing, and it is the part that changes the tax the most. Two people can buy the identical car, on the identical monthly payment, and get completely different tax relief depending on which piece of paper they signed.

The reason is that for tax purposes there are only two worlds, and the finance method decides which one you are in.

If you have decided a company car makes sense, the next question is what sort. And here the tax system is not subtle: it has picked a winner, and it is prepared to charge you a great deal of money for disagreeing.

One number drives nearly all of this. The taxable value of a company car is its list price multiplied by a percentage set by HMRC, and that percentage depends almost entirely on what comes out of the exhaust. Get the percentage right and a company car is cheap. Get it wrong and it is one of the most expensive things you can do.

A client asked us this recently after an unplanned bill: his car needed replacing sooner than expected, it cost a lot in one go, and he wondered whether the next one ought to go through the company. He runs a VAT-registered limited company, does around 10,000 business miles and 2,000 private a year, and could charge an electric car at home.

It is one of the most common questions we get from Kent business owners. The honest answer turns on your own numbers, but the framework is learnable, and this year’s changes have moved it a long way.

Making Tax Digital for Income Tax came in back in April, and we wrote about it at the time. What has happened since is the part nobody quite expected: roughly a third of the people who were supposed to sign up simply have not. HMRC has now lost patience with waiting, and from this month it starts signing those people up itself.

If you are a sole trader or a landlord anywhere across Gravesend, Dartford or Medway and you have been quietly hoping this would go away, this is the point at which it stops going away. Here is what is actually happening and what to do about it.

Ask ten Kent SME owners how they set their prices and you will get ten answers, most of them variations on “we worked out what we needed to charge to cover our costs and added a bit”. It is the single most common pricing approach we see in our advisory work, and it is also the one that quietly leaves the most money on the table.

This post is not a marketing piece. It is a finance lens on how pricing actually affects profit, why most SMEs underprice, and the four pricing models worth knowing in 2026.

Most Kent SMEs start the same way. A bookkeeper enters transactions, an accountant files the year-end accounts, and the owner runs the business on instinct supported by a quick look at the bank balance. For a while, that combination works. Then, somewhere between £500,000 and £2 million of turnover, it stops being enough.

This post is about that transition. When have you outgrown basic compliance? What does the next level of finance support actually look like? And do you need a Virtual FD, or just better monthly information?

Few things land on a Kent SME owner’s desk with the same chill as a brown envelope from HMRC announcing a compliance check. The reaction is almost always the same: a quick scan, a tight stomach, and a phone call to the accountant. The good news is that most enquiries are routine, manageable and end without anyone owing more tax. The bad news is that how you handle the first two weeks can decide whether the case stays routine or escalates.

This post explains what an HMRC enquiry actually is, what tends to trigger one in 2026, and the practical steps we take with our Kent clients when an enquiry letter arrives.

Growing Kent SMEs reach a moment when paying rent on a unit at the Imperial Business Estate, a workshop in Northfleet or an office in Gravesend stops feeling like a sensible operating cost and starts feeling like throwing money away. The temptation is to buy — and the next question is almost always “through the company, or personally?”.

The right answer is rarely obvious. This post walks through how we model the decision for our owner-managed clients in 2026, the four routes available, and the questions that drive a defensible recommendation.

Hiring your first employee is a milestone most Kent SME owners look forward to and most accountants quietly dread on their behalf. Not because the paperwork is hard, but because the cost is almost always higher than the gross salary number suggests, and a missed compliance step can turn a hire into a multi-thousand-pound headache.

This is the checklist we walk first-time employers through across our Gravesend client base. The order matters: get steps 1 to 4 done before the new starter’s first day, and steps 5 to 8 in the first three months.

The April 2025 Employer National Insurance overhaul did more to disrupt owner-managed company tax planning than any single policy change in the last decade. Rate up to 15%. Secondary threshold down to £5,000. Employment Allowance still available for most small employers, but not for director-only companies. By the time we got to the 2025/26 year-end, the optimum salary level for a director-shareholder looked nothing like it did in 2024.

Now that 2026/27 is fully in flight, the picture has stabilised. This post walks through the new maths, the practical answer for most Kent owner-managers, and the wider planning moves the NIC change has opened up.

The first conversation about tax-year-end planning is almost always too late. By February, most of the options that could have meaningfully changed an SME’s tax position are off the table. Pensions take weeks to set up. Capital expenditure decisions need procurement lead times. Reorganisations need professional advice and signed paperwork.

That is why we run our SME planning conversations with Gravesend and Kent business owners in July and August. Trading is steadier, clients have time to think, and there are still nine months until 5 April 2027 to put decisions into effect. This is the 12-point checklist we work through with clients each summer.