Most accountants only think about tax once a year, when they're preparing your return. By then it's too late to do anything about it — they're just reporting on what happened. Our tax planning service is different: we look ahead, identifying legal ways to reduce what you'll owe before the tax year ends, not after.
Tax planning isn't about exotic offshore schemes or aggressive avoidance — those rarely work and usually end badly. It's about using the reliefs, allowances and structures that Parliament has put in place specifically for individuals and businesses to use. Most people leave significant amounts of tax savings on the table simply because they don't know what's available.
Our tax planning service typically covers:
A simple example. A higher-rate taxpayer making a £10,000 pension contribution gets £4,000 of tax relief back. The same person putting £10,000 into an ISA gets none — but no future tax on gains. Same money, very different outcomes. Good planning is mostly about choosing between options like these with full information rather than guesswork.
Tax planning produces the biggest savings for people in three categories:
Higher-rate and additional-rate taxpayers — those earning over £50,270 (or above £125,140 if losing the personal allowance) face the highest marginal tax rates and have the most to gain from careful planning around pensions, salary sacrifice and timing of income.
Company directors and business owners — there are far more variables to play with when you control how money comes out of a business. The same profit can produce wildly different personal tax outcomes depending on how it's extracted.
People with significant assets — landlords with property portfolios, retirees with investments, families thinking about inheritance. The numbers involved are large enough that getting the structure right matters.
We're a straightforward local practice and we don't recommend aggressive tax avoidance schemes. If something sounds too good to be true, it almost always is — HMRC catch up with these schemes eventually, with interest and penalties on top. Everything we recommend is well-established, well-tested and stands up to HMRC scrutiny. That's the only kind of tax planning worth doing.
If HMRC has opened an enquiry into your tax affairs, we can step in to handle it. We have experience dealing with full enquiries, aspect enquiries, COP9 procedures, and the kind of correspondence that turns up unexpectedly months after you've forgotten about a tax return. Having a professional managing the response significantly improves outcomes — both in terms of any tax adjustment and the stress involved.
No. Tax planning means using the reliefs and allowances that the law specifically provides — pension contributions, ISAs, capital gains exemptions, marriage allowance, and so on. Tax evasion is illegal (hiding income, falsifying records). Tax avoidance sits in a grey area: technically legal but designed to defeat the spirit of the law. We do legitimate tax planning. We don't do aggressive avoidance schemes.
Before the end of the tax year (5th April). That's when you can still make pension contributions, use your ISA allowance, gift to family members, or restructure how income is received. Once 5th April has passed, most opportunities for that year are gone. So January or February is typically when we do annual planning reviews.
It varies enormously based on your circumstances. For a higher-rate taxpayer making good use of pension contributions, ISA allowances and basic planning, savings of £2,000-£10,000 per year are common. For a director-shareholder restructuring how they take profits, the savings can be larger. For someone on PAYE with simple affairs, the opportunities are usually more limited — we'll be honest about that in the first conversation.
No — we offer one-off tax planning reviews as well. If you'd like a second opinion on a specific decision (selling a property, structuring a business sale, considering a large pension contribution), we can do a paid one-off review without you having to switch accountants. Many clients who initially come for a one-off review do end up moving to us, but there's no pressure.
Don't reply yet — let us look at the letter first. HMRC enquiries can range from a routine compliance check to a serious investigation, and the right response depends entirely on which one you're dealing with. We can talk to HMRC on your behalf and ensure responses are well-prepared, accurate and complete. Acting quickly and professionally usually leads to much better outcomes than trying to handle it yourself.
Yes. Inheritance tax is one of the most planned-around taxes in the UK and there are many legitimate strategies — annual gifting allowances, the seven-year rule for larger gifts, business property relief, pension structuring, and trusts in some cases. The right approach depends on your assets, your family situation, and what you want to achieve. We provide straightforward IHT advice and can work alongside a solicitor on anything that needs formal legal structuring.
Book a free, no-obligation consultation. We'll explain how we can help, what it would cost, and what to do next — with no jargon and no pressure.
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