Accounting dates and tax returns

[V8mate]

With income unlikely to even cover an accountant's fee, I thought I'd do the first year's accounts and returns for a start-up myself.

I thought I'd just about got my head round it (that's a lie) when a new letter from the Revenue completely threw me.

Here we go:

Limited company was created on 15 October 2013.

HMRC writes to me with the following dates:

First accounting period end date	14 October 2014	31 October 2014
Date by which the company needs to:
pay its corporation tax	15 July 2015	01 August 2015
deliver its company tax return	31 October 2015	31 October 2015

I've been involved in several discussions on here regarding this oddity of, effectively, a double set of accounts to make the year end a month end... let's say that whilst not realy understanding it, I'd taken an objective position to ignore the understanding and do it anyway.


Then, a couple of weeks ago, I advised HMRC that the company started trading on 1 April 2014. Didn't think it would affect anything, until I received the following response from them:

First accounting period end date	01 April 2014
Date by which the company needs to:
pay its corporation tax	2 January 2015
deliver its company tax return	1 April 2015

Why have they changed the dates?
Why is the accounting end date, the day I started trading?
And in all cases, why do you pay your tax before submitting your tax return?

[V8mate]

Sorry - I'd hoped these dates were clear in the OP.

FTAoD:
What is the date of incorporation of the company? 15 October 2013

On what date did it start trading? 1 April 2014

What start date did you notify to HMRC? 1 April 2014 (I informed them during March 2014)


When you say 'trading'... that's the date from which the company had the capacity to take money. It had no mechanism to receive money prior to this. The company had, however, spent money between 15 Oct and 1 April, on various set-up costs and buying stock.

[V8mate]

Cool, thanks Eric.

I'll go back to them to query the latest letter, and see whether they think it's easier to return to the original dates, or for them to issues a further letter based around 1 April 2014 trading start date.


Unless turnover suddenly goes through the roof, given the likely extremely straight foward nature of the first year's accounts, is there really no elementary way of deriving a compliant set of accounts without an FCA's sign-off?