Self assessment expenses - billing date or payment date?
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.
Hi guys, have a question from my uni finance course but I’m unsure how to treat the initial loan (as a bond, or a bill or other, and what the face value of the loan is).  I’ll post the question below, any help is appreciated.  “Hi guys, I have a difficult university finance question that’s really been stressing me out....  “The amount borrowed is $300 million and the term of the debt credit facility is six years from today  The facility requires minimum loan repayments of $9 million in each financial year except for the first year.  The nominal rate for this form of debt is 5%. This intestest rate is compounded monthly and is fixed from the date the facility was initiated.  Assume that a debt repayment of $10 million is payed on 31 August 2018 and $9million on April 30 2019. Following on monthly repayments of $9 million at the end of each month from May 31 2019 to June 30 2021.  Given this information determine the outstanding value of the debt credit facility on the maturity date.”  Can anyone help me out with the answer? I’ve been wracking my brain trying to decide if I treat it as a bond or a bill.”  Thanks in advance, "I found your post while searching for this same exact problem. Found the answer on a different forum about a different topic, but what you want is a Cash Flow report.  Go to Reports>Income & Expenses>Cash Flow - then in Options, select the asset accounts you'd like to run the report for (""Calle's Checking"" or whatever) and the time period. It will show you a list of all the accounts (expense and others) with transactions effecting that asset. You can probably refine this further to show only expenses, but I found it useful to have all of it listed.  Not the prettiest report, but it'll get your there." It is important to understand that when or before you received services from your medical provider(s), you almost certainly signed a document stating that you understand that you are fully responsible for the entire bill, even though the provider  may be willing to bill the insurer on your behalf as a service. In almost all cases, this is the arrangement, so it is very unlikely that you will be able to dispute the validity of the bill, since you did receive the service and almost certainly agreed to be fully responsible for the payments. With regard to the discounts, your medical provides have likely contracted with your insurer to provide services at a certain price or discount level, so I would base all of your negotiations with the providers and/or the collectors on those amounts. They can't legitimately bill you for the full amount since you are insured by a company they have a contract with, and you are not self-pay/uninsured, and the fact that they haven't been paid by your insurer doesn't change that, because the discount likely depends on the contact they have with your insurer and not whether or not they are billed/paid by your insurer. Please note - this is a common arrangement, but I'd recommend that you verify this with your insurer. Unfortunately, payment in 90+ days is often typical by insurance standards, so it's not yet clear to me whether or not your insurer has broken any laws such as a Prompt Pay law, or violated the terms of your policy with them (read it!). However, you need to find out which claims rep/adjuster is handling your claims and follow up with them until the payments are made. It's not personal, so make this person's life miserable until it is done and call them so often that they know it's you by the caller ID. I would also recommend contacting the collector(s), and letting them know that you don't have the money and so will not be able to pay, provide them with copies of the EOBs that state that the insurance company plans to pay the providers, and then ignore their calls/letters until the payments are made. When they call, simply reiterate that you don't have the money and that your insurance company is in the process of paying the bills. You have to expect that you will be dealing with a low-paid employee that is following a script. You are just the next person on their robo-call list, and they are not going to understand that you don't have a pile of money laying around with which to pay them, even if you tell them repeatedly. Make sure that you at no point give them access to any of your financial accounts, such as a checking or savings account, or a debit card - they will access it and clean you out. It is likely that your insurance provider will pay the providers directly since they were likely billed by the providers originally. If the providers have sold the debt to the collectors (and are not just employing a collector for debt they still own), you may have to follow up with the providers as well and make sure that the collection activity stops, since the providers may also need to forward the payments to the collectors once they are paid by the insurance company. Of course, if the insurer refuses to pay the claims, at that point I would recommend meeting with a lawyer to seek to force them to pay. "In the US, you'd run the risk of being accused of fraud if this weren't set up properly.  It would only be proper if your wife could show that she were involved, acting as your agent, bookkeeper, etc. Even so, to suggest that your time is billed at one rate but you are only paid a tiny fraction of that is still a high risk alert.  I believe the expression ""if it quacks like a duck..."" is pretty universal. If not, I'll edit in a clarification.  note -I know OP is in UK, but I imagine tax collection is pretty similar in this regard." "But I have been having a little difficulty to include the expenditure in my monthly budget as the billing cycle is from the 16th to 15th of the next month and my income comes in at the end of the month. Many companies will let you change the statement date if you want, so one way to do this would be to request your bank to have statements due at the end of the month or first of month. You can call and ask, this might resolve your problem entirely. How can I efficiently add the credit card expenditure to my monthly budget? We do this using YNAB, which then means our monthly budget is separate from our actual bank accounts. When we spend, we enter the transaction into YNAB and it's ""spent."" Additionally, we just pay whatever our credit card balance is a day before the end of the month so it is at $0 when we do our budget discussion at the end of each month." If the hospital is run like hospitals in the US it can take a long time just to determine the bill. The hospital, Emergency room, ER doctors, surgeons, anesthesiologists, X-Ray department, pharmacy and laboratory are considered separate billing centers. It  can take a while to determine the charges for each section. Is there an insurance company involved? When there is one involved it can take weeks or months before the hospital determines what the individual owes. The co-pays, coverages, and limits can be very confusing. In my experience it can take a few months before the final amount is known. You may want to call the hospital to determine the status of the bills. Personal story here: I ended up at the Santa Monica hospital without insurance and left with a bill of $30k-$35k. They really helped me, so I felt like I had a duty to pay them. However, close inspection revealed ridiculous markups on some items which I would have disputed, but I noticed that I had been billed for a few thousands of services not rendered. I got very mad at them for this, they apologized, told me they'd fix it. I never heard back from them and they never put it in collection either. I'm assuming they (rightfully) got scared that I'd go to court and this would be bad publicity. Sometimes I feel guilty I didn't pay them anything, sometimes I feel like they tried to screw me. I store all my receipts digitally, and make sure to input them into accounting program sooner than later, just so I don't forget about it. For practical purposes, the two important things are: Any kind of a digital system makes this pretty easy, even just putting the sums in a spreadsheet and the receipts into files with the date in the name. However, because it's easy enough, I also have a box where I stuff the paper receipts. I expect never to need them, but should something very weird happen to my computer and backups, they would be there. Careful, here.  The last time we got a bill from the doctor's office because they made a billing mistake it turns out the bill was a mistake.  Before you pay anything go through the list of charges and payments and make sure it's accurate.  (In our case she went to an appointment and was then told there was no reason for the doctor to see her that day.  Several months later a bill for the visit showed up--except they hadn't kept straight what payment was for what visit so it took some digging to figure out what had happened. Even for those of us who aren't at risk of over drafting, direct debit is a less-than-stellar option. Direct debit is a great way to begin ignoring how large your bills are. By explicitly paying them through my bank's online billpay, I notice immediately when a bill is larger than it ought to be. This is often caused by a billing error. In which case I've found it far easier to resolve disputes when the money is still in my hands. It's significantly harder to convince an internet provider, cell phone service, or utility to reverse an incorrect charge after it's been paid than it is before. The other times, it's because I've been using the service more than normal. For example, sending text messages more frequently or using more electricity. Explicitly paying these bills makes me realize upfront that there's been a change in my behavior and I can either reduce my expenses or accept the higher cost for higher service. My own experience leads me to believe that paying your bills automatically every month is a great way to ignore these events, and leak money like a sieve. Online bill pay makes doing this as trivial as I could hope for, and the risk of missing a payment is essentially nil. The hospital likely has a contract with your insurance company which makes them obligated to bill the insurance before billing you! I had a similar occurrence that was thrown out when my insurance company provided a copy of a contract with the hospital to the judge. So if there is an agreement they must file with the insurance in timely manner. "According to the instructions for IRS Form 8889,  Expenses incurred before you establish your HSA are not qualified medical expenses. If, under the last-month rule, you are considered to be an eligible individual for the entire year for determining the contribution amount, only those expenses incurred after you actually establish your HSA are qualified medical expenses. Accordingly, your medical expenses from year A are not considered ""qualified medical expenses"" and you should not use funds in your HSA to pay them unless you would like to pay taxes on the distributed funds and a 20% penalty. Publication 969 states very clearly on page 9: How you report your distributions depends on whether or not you use the distribution for qualified medical expenses (defined earlier). If you use a distribution from your HSA for qualified medical expenses, you do not pay tax on the distribution but you have to report the distribution on Form 8889. There is nothing about the timing of contributions versus distributions. As long as the distribution is for a qualified medical expense, the distribution will not be included in gross income and not subject to penalty regardless of how much money you had in your HSA when you incurred the medical expense." My guess:  they are giving you a constant number of days between when the bill is sent and when it is due.  Due dates are usually set either: same date each month IE the 3rd of each month. same day IE first thursday of the month. Note: due date might vary based on weekends. Number of days in the month - date on bill should be pretty constant if due date option #1 is being used.  Note how Feb dates were usually earlier, since it is a shorter month. If you read all that paperwork they made you fill out at the emergency room, there is probably something in there explicitly stating that you owe any bills you rack up regardless of what happens with the insurance company. They generally have a disclaimer that filing for you with your insurance company is a courtesy service they offer, but they are not obliged to do it.  Ultimately, you are responsible for your bills even if the provider slow-billed you.  Sorry. Better suited to /r/personalfinance, but you definitely owe the money. Unless you had something in writing that they were going to send a bill to a certain address, it's your responsibility to pay. Hell, even if you did have something in writing that said they'd send the bill somewhere else it's still your responsibility to pay even if the bill doesn't show up. You know you owed them money.  When your parents didn't get the bill, you should have called the company to ask about it. It's your responsibility to follow up since you're the one that owes the money.  What did you think would happen when you went 5 months without paying $312 that you knew you owed?