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Wed 9th Jun 2021 Can you believe we are already halfway through the year? It feels like we’ve just come out of a long winter and the summer is now here, so it may seem odd that we would want to talk about Self Assessments, but to avoid missed deadline penalties it’s important to get ahead.

In January 2021, although 10.7million people submitted their 2019/20 returns by the 31st of January deadline, HMRC estimated that almost 1.8m people missed the deadline - nearly double the rate reported the previous year.

Deadline day is always the busiest day of the year and if you’ve submitted your Self-Assessment tax return on this day you will know the stress that comes with it and so to avoid it would be the obvious solution. Other than the financial penalty you could face, here are some other reasons why submitting early makes sense:

It takes time to register

Registering with HMRC is essential and takes time, the general guidance is two weeks but if you procrastinate until the rush after Christmas then this will take much longer and bring you dangerously close to a late submission.

You have time to budget for your tax bill.

Even though you’re going to be submitting your Self-Assessment early, this won’t mean you need to pay your tax bill at the same time and you will still have until 31st January to do this, giving you months to budget.

The admin takes time

To file your Self-Assessment you need all kinds of paperwork – P45s, P60s, expenses, invoices, and bank statements. Trying to pull all this together takes time and can be stressful trying to collate.

You can enjoy Christmas without the stress!

Who wants to have their Self-Assessment looming over their heads when we’re going to be enjoying the Christmas we’ve waited a whole pandemic for?

Get it done early so you can put your feet up later on in the year.

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