In the UK, can authors split a single advance on a book over multiple tax returns?
HMRC calls it: Averaging for creators of literary or artistic works, and it is the averaging of your profits for 2 successive years. It's helpful in situations like you describe, where income can fluctuate wildly from year to year, the linked article has the full detail, but some of the requirements are: You can use averaging if: you’re self-employed or in a partnership, and the business started   before 6 April 2014 and didn’t end in the 2015 to 2016 tax year  your   profits are wholly or mainly from literary, dramatic, musical or   artistic works or from designs  you or your business partner (if you’re   in a partnership) created the works personally. Additionally: Check that your profit for the poorer year, minus any adjusted amounts, is less than 75% of the figure for your better year. If it is, you can use averaging. Then, check if the difference between your profits for the 2 years is more than 30% of your profit for the better year. If it is, work out the average by adding together the profits for the 2 years, and divide the total by 2.
I cannot speak for the specific jurisdictions but you will generally pay income tax in each jurisdiction and be required to declare your foreign income in both. Your annual assessment takes into account both domestic and foreign income so sadly, there is no tax windfall to you. I would imagine that Finland and Belgium have tax treaties so you will not have to pay tax twice. You need an accountant in both countries to sort this for you. "You will be filing the exact same form you've been filing until now (I hope...) which is called form 1040. Attached to it, you'll add a ""Schedule C"" form and ""Schedule SE"" form. Keep in mind the potential effect of the tax and totalization treaties the US has with the UK which may affect your filings. I suggest you talk to a licensed EA/CPA who works with expats in the UK and is familiar with all the issues. There are several prominent offices you can find by Googling." "I'm answering my own question because in some sense, I alone know the answer. After the review, HMRC decided to waive all penalties (including the initial £100 penalty for late filing, which I had not appealed against) because ""HMRC may not have informed me"" about the mounting penalties. I had pretty good evidence that they hadn't informed me as there was a software change and immediately after that I got an initial penalty notice followed a day or so later by the further penalty notice.  But I am happy with the outcome, I wasn't going to argue any further!" No, there is no special leniency given to first time tax payers. In general, this shouldn't be an issue. The IRS collects your taxes out of every one of your paychecks throughout the entire year in what is called a Withholding Tax. The amount that the IRS withholds is calculated on your W-4 Form that you file with your employer whenever you take a new job. The form helps you calculate the right number of allowances to claim (usually this is the number of personal exemptions, but depending upon if you work a second job, are married and your spouse works, or if you itemize, the number of allowances can be increased. WITHHOLDING TAX Withholding tax (also known as “payroll withholding”) is essentially income tax that is withheld from your wages and sent directly to the IRS by your employer. In other words, it’s like a credit against the income taxes that you must pay for the year. By subtracting this money from each paycheck that you receive, the IRS is basically withholding your anticipated tax payment as you earn it. In general, most people overestimate their tax liability. This is bad for them, because they have essentially given the IRS an interest free loan (and weren't able to use the money to earn interest themselves.) I haven't heard of any program targeted at first time tax payers to tell them to file a return, but considering that most tax payers overpay they should or they are giving the government a free grant. "I think the £35K band applies to the ""dividend income"" not the ""dividend paid to you"", and so you would only actually get £31.5K (90% of £35K) in your pocket before the next tax band kicked in. If your company will only supplying large VAT registered entities, then register for VAT yourself and elect the Flat Rate scheme - depending on your area of business, given that you have no expenses, your company will get an extra 7% - 14% on its income for free. Your clients won't care that you charge them VAT because they'll claim it back. Finally, depending on what your company is for, beware of the dreaded IR35" There is no clear answer, it might be or not be. Depends a lot on your situation. 1)Yes it is taxable but as Italy has a double taxation agreement with UK, you might not have to pay. You can get a detailed guidance on the HMRC website. 2) Apply here for a certificate of residence  3)You can only claim back if Italy taxes you more than UK would. If it is less than you will have to pay the remaining portion to HMRC. You do this in the self assessment form/tax return/call up HMRC. 4)Tell the truth, explain your whole scenario and don't withheld relevant information assuming you may lower you tax by doing so. The 'same day rule' in the UK is a rule for matching purposes only.  It says that sales on any day are matched firstly with purchases made on the same day for the purposes of ascertaining any gain/loss. Hence the phrase 'bed-and-breakfast' ('b&b') when you wish to crystalise a gain (that is within the exempt amount) and re-establish a purchase price at a higher level.  You do the sale on one day, just before the market closes, which gets matched with your original purchase, and then you buy the shares back the next day, just after the market opens.  This is standard tax-planning.  Whenever you have a paper gain, and you wish to lock that gain out of being taxed, you do a bed-and-breakfast transaction, the idea being to use up your annual exemption each and every year.  Of course, if your dealing costs are high, then they may outweigh any tax saved, and so it would be pointless. For the purpose of an example, let's assume that the UK tax year is the same as the calendar year. Scenario 1. Suppose I bought some shares in 2016, for a total price of Stg.50,000. Suppose by the end of 2016, the holding is worth Stg.54,000, resulting in a paper gain of Stg.4,000. Question.  Should I do a b&b transaction to make use of my Stg.11,100 annual exemption ? Answer.  Well, with transaction costs at 1.5% for a round-trip trade, suppose, and stamp duty on the purchase of 0.5%, your total costs for a b&b will be Stg1,080, and your tax saved (upon some future sale date) assuming you are a 20% tax-payer is 20%x(4,000-1,080) = Stg584 (the transaction costs are deductible, we assume).  This does not make sense. Scenario 2. The same as scenario 1., but the shares are worth Stg60,000 by end-2016. Answer.  The total transaction costs are 2%x60,000 = 1,200 and so the taxable gain of 10,000-1,200 = 8,800 would result in a tax bill of 20%x8,800 = 1,760 and so the transaction costs are lower than the tax to be saved (a strict analysis would take into account only the present value of the tax to be saved), it makes sense to crystalise the gain.  We sell some day before the tax year-end, and re-invest the very next day. Scenario 3. The same as scenario 1., but the shares are worth Stg70,000 by end-2016. Answer.  The gain of 20,000 less costs would result in a tax bill for 1,500 (this is: 20%x(20,000 - 2%x70,000 - 11,100) ).  This tax bill will be on top of the dealing costs of 1,400.  But the gain is in excess of the annual exemption.  The strategy is to sell just enough of the holding to crystallise a taxable gain of just 11,100. The fraction, f%, is given by: f%x(70,000-50,000) - 2%xf%x70,000 = 11,100 ... which simplifies to: f% = 11,100/18,600 = 59.68%. The tax saved is 20%x11,100 = 2,220, versus costs of 2%x59.58%x70,000 = 835.52. This strategy of partial b&b is adopted because it never makes sense to pay tax early ! End. "I think the ""right"" way to approach this is for your personal books and your business's books to be completely separate. You would need to really think of them as separate things, such that rather than being disappointed that there's no ""cross transactions"" between files, you think of it as ""In my personal account I invested in a new business like any other investment"" with a transfer from your personal account to a Stock or other investment account in your company, and ""This business received some additional capital"" which one handles with a transfer (probably from Equity) to its checking account or the like. Yes, you don't get the built-in checks that you entered the same dollar amount in each, but (1) you need to reconcile your books against reality anyway occasionally, so errors should get caught, and (2) the transactions really are separate things from each entity's perspective. The main way to ""hack it"" would be to have separate top-level placeholder accounts for the business's Equity, Income, Expenses, and Assets/Liabilities. That is, your top-level accounts would be ""Personal Equity"", ""Business Equity"", ""Personal Income"", ""Business Income"", and so on. You can combine Assets and Liabilities within a single top-level account if you want, which may help you with that ""outlook of my business value"" you're looking for. (In fact, in my personal books, I have in the ""Current Assets"" account both normal things like my Checking account, but also my credit cards, because once I spend the money on my credit card I want to think of the money as being gone, since it is. Obviously this isn't ""standard accounting"" in any way, but it works well for what I use it for.) You could also just have within each ""normal"" top-level placeholder account, a placeholder account for both ""Personal"" and ""My Business"", to at least have a consistent structure. Depending on how your business is getting taxed in your jurisdiction, this may even be closer to how your taxing authorities treat things (if, for instance, the business income all goes on your personal tax return, but on a separate form). Regardless of how you set up the accounts, you can then create reports and filter them to include just that set of business accounts. I can see how just looking at the account list and transaction registers can be useful for many things, but the reporting does let you look at everything you need and handles much better when you want to look through a filter to just part of your financial picture. Once you set up the reporting (and you can report on lists of account balances, as well as transaction lists, and lots of other things), you can save them as Custom Reports, and then open them up whenever you want. You can even just leave a report tab (or several) open, and switch to it (refreshing it if needed) just like you might switch to the main Account List tab. I suspect once you got it set up and tried it for a while you'd find it quite satisfactory." I think there are actually two separate questions here. Will Provider A allow me to transfer only part of an ISA product to Provider B while keeping the other part in Provider A. Only Provider A can answer this. Will HMRC rules allow me to keep making payments to the part that remained in Provider A. I don't have a definitive source for this, but in my experience where the ISA rules have been unclear about particular edge cases and I have asked HMRC similar questions directly, their answer has always been that they will look at the situation in the round at the end of the tax year (they get summaries from the providers) and as long as you haven't attempted to double-benefit or otherwise get around the limits, they won't have an issue with it. I love the flat rate VAT scheme. It's where you pay a percentage based on your industry. An example might be Computer repair services, where you'll pay 10.5% of your total revenue to the HMRC. But you'll be invoicing for VAT at 20% still. Would definitely recommend registering for it since you're expecting to cross the threshold anyway. And like DumbCoder said, you also get a first year discount of 1%, so in the example above, you'd end up paying 9.5% VAT on your turnover. I personally found it a pain to invoice without VAT (my clients expected it), so registering made sense regardless of the fact I was over threshold. The tricky bit is keeping under the £150k turnover so you stay eligible for the flat rate. It does get more complex otherwise. Is it true that you cannot amend a tax return to include both a   futures loss carry back and a Schedule C at the same time? No, it is not true. You can include all the changes necessary in a single amended return, attaching statement explaining each of the changes. However you're talking about two different kinds of changes. Futures loss carryback is a Sec. 1212 carryback and not a correction of an error. Adding Schedule C would be a correction of an error. I'm guessing your CPA wants to separate the two kinds to avoid the situation where the IRS refuses to accept your correction of an error and by the way also doesn't accept the Sec. 1212 carryback on the same return. Or the CPA just wants to charge you twice for amendments. My understanding (I am not a lawyer or tax expert) is that you are not allowed to work for free, but you can pay yourself minimum wage for the hours worked. There are probably National Insurance implications as well but I don't know. The main thing is, though, that if HMRC think that you've set up this system as a tax avoidance scheme then they're allowed to tax you as though all the income had been yours in the first place. If you are considering such a setup I would strongly advise you to hire a qualified small business accountant who will be familiar with the rules and will be able to advise you on what is and is not possible / sensible. Falling outside the rules (even inadvertently) leaves you liable to a lot of hassle and potentially fines etc. The CPA's mention of $2,500 is probably referring to the recently increased de minimis safe harbor under the final tangible property regulations (used to be $500) without an applicable financial statement. The IRS will not challenge your choice of expense or capitalization on amounts on or below $2500 if you elect the de minimis safe harbor election on your return. However, you must follow whatever you're doing for your books. (So if you are capitalizing your laptops for book purposes, you would also need to capitalize for tax purposes). Section 179 allows you to expense property that you would have otherwise have had to capitalize and depreciate. Section 179 can be annoying, especially if your LLC is treated as a passthrough, because there are recapture provisions when you dispose of the asset too early. For the tax return preparer, it makes the return preparation much more simple if there are no fixed assets to account for in the first place, which is quite possible if you are expensive all items/invoices less than $2,500. Unless you're running a self-employed business with a significant turnover (more than £150k), you are entitled to use cash basis accounting for your tax return, which means you would put the date of transactions as the payment date rather than the billing date or the date a debt is incurred. For payments which have a lag, e.g. a cheque that needs to be paid in or a bank transfer that takes a few days, you might also need to choose between multiple payment dates, e.g. when you initiated the payment or when it took effect. You can pick one as long as you're consistent: You can choose how you record when money is received or    paid (eg the date the money enters your account or the date a cheque   is written) but you must use the same method each tax year. "There is a ten year statue of limitations on debt collection, bankruptcy, etc. The problem is, if you start paying, even say, $1, you ""acknowledge"" the debt and the clock starts again. Debt claims fall under the ""he said, she said,"" rubric. In debt restructuring situations, the debtor is taught to write all their creditors DENYING debts. Some percentage of those creditors won't have the paperwork to back up their claims. Others will, and can press their claims. Then a court decides.  But in any event, a debt more than tens years old is a ""stale,"" debt. A court is likely to rule in your favor. Unless you ""acknowledge"" the debt."