Hello, can anyone please help? I started to rent out a property on 12th May 2021. I’ve just registered for tax self assessment. I’m thinking about trying to submit my own assessment. I have no mortgage/loan on the property and I’ve kept all the bills for repairs, decoration etc and I only have the one rental property.
I had thought about using an online tax service to submit my assessment and I might still go down this route.
Can anyone please offer me any advice, and are there any online services that I could use for my return that anyone would recommend/avoid?
You can just do it through the HMRC website, filling in the boxes.
If you want software filing, I use Taxfiler (for 100+ returns as an accountant) and they do personal licences too…
You just add the sections that you need and fill them in and it puts everything in the right boxes.
If you want software to actually keep the records, it would be difficult to recommend any particular one at the moment because they are all developing their ‘making tax digital’ offerings and there may be winners and losers!
If you are thinking of an online accountancy type service, I suspect you would do all of the work for them to charge a fee to fill in the return! If they are a pile them high and do it cheap place they are unlikely to question what you enter, and probably just automatically enter what you put in into the tax return.
Making tax digital, by the way, is a requirement coming in from April 2024 for landlords (and sole traders) with income (turnover - ie gross rental income before deducting any costs… including agents fees) of over £10,000. They will have to make a digital filing from records recording the individual transactions (the totals are filed not the individual entries) every quarter, with a final filing at year end to make any adjustments.
Hello Cath and thanks very much for your help. Do you know if its possible to download a typical tax self assessment form, so that I can have a go at completing a form, before filing an online form?
My rent is only £500/month, unfurnished and without council/tax and services? I’m assuming my tax year will end in April this year and I have until January 2023 to submit my assessment and tax payment?
If you register for self assessment through the Govt gateway, you can experiment with it now without submitting it, although you will have to change all the figures later.
Thanks very much for your help Cath, it’s much appreciated. I’ll have a look at the forms and check out the webinars.
This will help me to prepare the self assessment.
Thanks again
Adrian
Can I piggy back on this, I am confident about the self assessment form and think you will be fine, my query is I need to split the rent income with my husband 50:50 but how do I cater for the allowable expenses, I assume we dedecut from the rent and then split 50:50 as profit is that right ? Or do we split at gross and split the expenses and then use that figure, the outcome is the same but want to follow the correct process.thanks
You need to split everything 50/50 and fill the relevant boxes in on each return.
You don’t have to fill all of the expense boxes in, assuming your rental income is less than £85k, you can just put the total in the other allowable expenses box
So you need total income, total expenses (excl finance costs: interest and other finance costs such as mortgage arrangement and legal fees) and total finance costs. And you put 50% of the totals on each return.