Our Blog

If you run a shop, cafe, salon, pub or any business with a high-street presence across Gravesend, Dartford or Medway, your business rates bill looks different this year. April 2026 brought the biggest change to the system in years: a full revaluation of every property, the end of the temporary retail, hospitality and leisure relief, and a brand-new set of multipliers. Some Kent businesses are paying less, some are paying more, and a fair few owners have opened their bill and not quite understood why. Here is what has changed, in plain English.

Early August is usually a quiet moment in the tax calendar for Kent business owners. The second payment on account fell due on 31 July, the summer is in full swing, and Self Assessment feels a long way off. But behind the scenes there is a change worth knowing about: HMRC is consulting on reforming payments on account, and it could eventually change when sole traders and landlords across Gravesend, Dartford and Medway hand their tax over. The consultation closes on 4 August 2026, so this is a good moment to understand what is on the table.

For directors who do not need to draw all their profits right now, one route has quietly become more attractive: having the company pay into your pension directly. Two rounds of dividend tax rises have shifted the maths, and an employer pension contribution now compares more favourably with taking the same money out as a dividend than it did a couple of years ago. This post explains the tax treatment of employer pension contributions for a company director. It deliberately stops short of advising on pensions themselves — more on that important boundary at the end.

When you first set up a limited company, one habit is worth building before any other: keeping the company’s money and your own money completely apart. It sounds obvious, yet it is the single most common thing newly incorporated directors across Kent get wrong — usually because they carried on exactly as they did when they were a sole trader, running everything through one account. Here is why it matters so much, and how to get it right from day one.

Plenty of the growing companies we act for in Kent hit the same puzzle. Profits rise past £50,000, and the effective rate of corporation tax quietly starts climbing — but not all the way to 25%, and not in a way the headline rates seem to explain. The answer is marginal relief, and it is one of those things almost everyone searches for and almost nobody finds explained clearly. So here it is, with the arithmetic actually shown rather than asserted.

Here is a situation we see all the time. A director needs some money, so they take it out of the company — a few hundred here, a couple of thousand there — meaning to sort out how to classify it later. Later never quite comes. Then the year-end arrives and we have to explain that they have built up an overdrawn director’s loan account, and there may be a tax charge attached. Almost nobody does this deliberately; most do not realise they have done anything at all. This post explains what a director’s loan is, and how to stay the right side of the rules.

If you own and run your own limited company, few decisions matter more to your take-home than how you pay yourself. The answer used to be almost automatic: a small salary and the rest as dividends. That is still usually the right shape — but two rounds of dividend tax rises and a higher rate of employer National Insurance have narrowed the gap, and last year’s plan is no longer guaranteed to be this year’s. Here is how it works for 2026/27, in plain terms, with the numbers shown.

“Can I put this through the company?” It is the question we field more than almost any other from directors across Kent — and the nervousness behind it is understandable. Claim too little and you pay more corporation tax than you need to; claim the wrong things and you invite trouble. The good news is that the rules, while not always intuitive, are learnable. This guide covers what a limited company director can legitimately claim, where the traps are, and why the treatment differs from being self-employed.

“Sorry, the agency only pays through an umbrella.” If you contract in Kent, you have probably heard some version of that line — and wondered whether it is actually true, and what it is quietly costing you. Umbrella companies and your own limited company are two very different ways to get paid, and the right one depends on the work in front of you. This post lays out the trade-offs and, most importantly, the number contractors most often get caught out by.

If you contract through your own limited company, sooner or later someone will hand you a contract with the words “outside IR35” written across the top — and expect you to know what that means. For a lot of the Kent contractors we speak to, that is the moment the panic sets in. IR35 has a reputation for being impenetrable. It really is not, once someone explains it in plain terms. This post does exactly that.

Westminster has just been through one of its busiest weeks in years. Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July 2026, and within days he had named a new Chancellor of the Exchequer — John Healey, who replaces Rachel Reeves at the Treasury. For business owners across Gravesend, Dartford and Medway, that matters for one simple reason: a new Chancellor writes his own Budget, and some of the tax plans we had all assumed were settled are suddenly back in the air.

Every January, the same thing happens. Sole traders and landlords across Kent spend the last week of the month hunting for bank statements, chasing figures and filing their tax return with hours to spare. It is stressful, it is avoidable, and it almost always costs more than doing the same job calmly in the autumn. With the 2025/26 tax year now closed, the sensible move is to get your Self Assessment sorted early — and here is why it pays.

The VAT registration threshold has sat at £90,000 since April 2024, and most Kent SMEs we work with treat it as a hard line: trade below it, stay unregistered; cross it, sign up. In practice the right answer is rarely that simple, and a surprising number of small businesses end up either registering when they should not, or holding off when they would actually be better registered.

This post is the plain-English version of the conversation we have most often with Kent SME clients on the cusp of VAT. The aim is to help you make a deliberate decision, not a default one.

The Bank of England left its base rate unchanged at its June meeting, holding at 3.75%. For business owners across Kent watching their borrowing costs, it is a moment of stability rather than relief — and with the next decision due on 30 July, it is a good point to take stock of what the rate environment means for your business over the summer.

If you take your income from a company as a mix of salary and dividends — as most owner-directors across Kent do — your tax bill has quietly gone up this year. Dividend tax rates rose from April 2026, and a separate change made selling a business more expensive too. Neither was headline news, but both matter to how you should plan for the 2026/27 tax year.