Articles - Felix & Co. Accountants

For limited company owners, dividends are often a great method to take out your hard-earned profit in a more tax efficient way.

However, the process of giving yourself money via dividends isn’t totally straightforward. It’s all too easy to make a mistake and give yourself a tax problem instead.

The most common mistake is when limited company owners view their dividends as their monthly ‘pay’. This viewpoint then results in the ltd company owners drawing out a sum of money each month as a ‘dividend’, with no regard to company performance. That is one big no-no.

So, this blog is about one of the ways your ‘dividend’ could be illegal, and how to avoid it.

Why your dividend might be illegal

There can a few reasons why a dividend might be illegal, including:

Misunderstanding who can legally vote the dividend,
A lack of documentation
Not understanding the need for true profits to be available

As numbers people, we’d like to talk about the profit issue here. For a dividend to be legal there are several things that need to happen, which we cover in this blog on the subject. Just marking a bank payment as ‘dividend’ isn’t enough.

Is there sufficient profit to award a dividend?

There needs to be enough ‘profit’ to be able to pay any dividend. You need to be sure this profit exists. So, you need to review the most up to date set of accounts or reports you have before any dividend is considered.

If you are in the ‘cloud’ accounting world, you may have access to this via a product like Xero or QuickBooks. Log in and scroll down to the bottom of your accounts or Balance Sheet report, where you usually see something like this:

For many small businesses, the bottom figure ‘Total Capital and Reserves’ is often a good indicator of whether a dividend can be paid (and potentially how much). However, the figure can contain values that can’t have a dividend paid from them, such as share ‘capital’ (£2 in the above) or ‘share premium’ (not shown here).

In this example, the company looks in a reasonable position on paper to pay a dividend. However, there are some common pitfalls that mean in reality there could not actually be enough profits to pay money as a dividend.

Is your book-keeping accurate and up to date?

One major pitfall can be if your book-keeping isn’t accurate. Your book-keeping may not have taken into account a lot of adjustments such as:

The drop in value of the things (physical assets) your company owns (‘Depreciation’)
Timing adjustments
Provisions for expenses or income not yet made.

Other issues can include:

Dividends in the software are being shown in the ‘Profit and Loss’ report rather than in the Balance Sheet.
You are using last year’s accounts, so the data is likely to be out of date.

Get into the Balance Sheet habit

Get into the habit of reviewing the Total Capital and Reserves section of the Balance Sheet. It might not be completely accurate or current, but at least you’ll gain some awareness of whether a payment is likely to be ok as a dividend.

The most common scenario we see where dividend payments has gone wrong is where this ‘capital and reserves’ figure is very small, and the owner has not taken into account the adjustments for future tax, timing or depreciation.

My dividends might be illegal, what do I do?

There isn’t a generic answer we can give here as it varies wildly, based on your individual situation.

What we can say though that in many cases, the payment can often be reflected as a loan to the director instead. In reality, this is the key consequence of getting this wrong. Under the Companies Act, the shareholders could be asked to repay that dividend (essentially the same treatment as a loan).

I’m worried about making legal dividends

Review your figures and ask your accountant for help in understanding how this all works for you and your company. If you don’t have an accountant, or feel you aren’t making the most of dividends and other limited company tax opportunities with your current accountant, we can help. Just get in touch.

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Top 5 book-keeping mistakes to avoid! Our book-keepers and accountants regularly see common mistakes made by business clients who do their own bookkeeping.

If you’re making the same mistakes in your business bookkeeping, these will cost your business money in either additional tax or penalties. More importantly, you won’t get the ‘right’ numbers on which to base important business decisions.

If you can’t see the correct amount of profit you are making, how do you know if you could hire that next (or first) person to join your team?
If you are entering costs incorrectly, your tax bill will be wrong.

The top 5 common mistakes to avoid!

This blog mainly deals with common mistakes from an accounting software point of view (Xero, QuickBooks etc). However, many of the points apply even if you are keeping a basic spreadsheet instead.

1 The obvious one – incorrect entries

The most common error is simply entering the wrong dates, amounts and/or category of a given cost. A simple error can become double-trouble if you’re using accounting software where your bank is connected, and sends a ‘feed’ to the app.

These apps are clever and try to match amounts paid on your bank statement with receipts you have entered into the system. It says, ‘Hey is this amount on your bank statement paying off this receipt?’.

If the values don’t match, the app won’t be able to match up the receipt you’ve entered. In most cases, this leads to the app adding the bank statement line as a cost again. This effectively is double entering that cost, once as an incorrect receipt, and once when seen on the bank statement/feed.

If you are VAT registered this is even worse, as you potentially have a double VAT claim, or at best an incorrect one!

2 Not checking your ‘accounts payable’ / ‘accounts receivable’ reports

One of the best ways to check you have these important accounts right is to bring up a ‘Accounts Payable’ report. This shows who you owe what to on any given day.

Check your Accounts Payable report … and think, “Is this correct at that date?”. If you have items that are negative figures, or you think “I don’t owe that!’”, it’s likely you have a bookkeeping problem.

Another common indicator of a mistake is where this report has negative figures on it, or have incorrect balances. What’s more, this is just one side of the problem. It’s also likely your Profit and Loss report is also wrong, and that’s the one that shows how much money you are making – or not!

Points to look out for are:

- Personal payments. When you paid a receipt personally, so it didn’t come out of your business bank account. You just need to mark it as paid in your software.
- Duplicate entries. If you have a balance due to one of your suppliers you know isn’t right, try checking the individual invoice/receipt listing to see if there is a duplicate amount there.
- A negative figure. This makes it looks like you’ve overpaid. It’s often a dating issue with either the receipt or a payment, but it could be a multiple of other issues.

Now do the same with your accounts receivable report. This shows which customers owe you money. You are looking for the same errors (invoices you know are paid, negative numbers, etc).

3 Entering net wages direct to ‘wages’

You will usually have a few elements of pay to account for such as:

- Gross wages (what it actually cost you)
- Net wages (what went to the employees’ bank)
- Tax/National Insurance (that you pay to HM Revenue & Customs having deducted it from their bank payment)
- Employers National Insurance costs

You may also have pension costs to deal with.

Wages paid to you or your team that are run through a payroll scheme often require multiple entries. Often, we see just the net wages being put to ‘Wages’. This is incorrect as the true cost is usually much higher than the amount that goes into the employee’s bank account.

When HMRC are paid, that transaction is often put to all sorts of categories! Often the best way to deal with this is to use a ‘Journal’ and what is known as a ‘control account’ for wages paid, PAYE and pensions. However, that’s a subject way too long to explain in this short blog!

4 Entering ‘assets’ as an expense item

Items are often treated as business ‘assets’ if they:

Will last more than a year
Are usually higher value (say over £200)

These items should get put into an asset category, not an expense.

For example, your new MacBook should go to ‘Computer Equipment’ (Asset) or ‘Plant and Machinery’ (!) (Asset) etc, rather than some other expense line. This will help make sure your accounts are correct.

5 Entering drawings or dividends as a ‘wages’ expense

When you are paying yourself, some owners will put their pay to ‘wages’.

Unless they are wages paid through a payroll scheme, these costs are not technically ‘wages. They won’t be coming off your profits, as they ARE the profits! So, they shouldn’t be shown as a company expense.

- Generally, these payments should go to accounts such as an ‘equity’ account called Dividends Paid (Ltd company) or Owners Drawing (sole trader).
- If you’re a limited company, you might also point them at the ‘Directors Loan Account’ and deal with them later.

A final ‘Bonus Mistake’

There’s one final critical common mistake to avoid – make sure your bank balance is correct inside the software! There are many ways to do this, but one would be to bring up a ‘Balance Sheet’ report, go to the bank balance and check if the figure shown there matches your bank statement on that date.

If not, you have some work to do!

Want to avoid making these top 5 mistakes?

Ask your accountant or book a consultation with us. We offer a paid 1-hour, 1-2-1 consultation so you can ask simple questions of an accountant. If you don’t have an accountant or bookkeeper yet, we’d love a chat about how we can help.

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