Yesterday we were proud to be able to hand our Charity of the Year SV2, a cheque for £3,691 thanks to the huge effort from the team of staff who completed the renowned Three Peaks Challenge back in August.

Rumour has it that some of the team underwent more training than others in the lead-up to the event but all who entered, made it through the gruelling 23 mile long, 3,064 meter ascent, whilst travelling a total of 462 miles between venues!

Ashgates are extremely proud of the members of staff who took time out of their personal lives to contribute such a huge effort to assist our Charity of the SV2 and also to all of those family members, clients and contacts who have ever so kindly donated towards the cause.

It is not too late to donate to our Charity of the Year SV2 - those wishing to contribute to such a great cause can do so by visiting - https://svtwo.charitycheckout.co.uk/pf/Ashgates-Three-Peaks-Challenge

UPDATE: our Budget commentary is now available here.

The Chancellor has now made his final Budget speech before Brexit.  Here are a few highlights.  Watch out for our in depth commentary, coming soon.

​The highlights:

We are delighted to announce that we have now made it to Xero Gold Partner level!

We are thoroughly enjoying our journey with Xero so far, the benefits of using the solution with clients have been there for all to see. We have a large number of clients that have joined our journey and they are constantly telling us about the huge difference Xero is making to not only their bookkeeping but their business as a whole.

With continual development, Xero is evolving and improving all the time and we are excited to see further developments in the future.

Partner, Ian Johnson had this to say on the news “Ashgates are delighted to be awarded the Xero Gold Partner status. Since we began our cloud accounting journey back in 2014, we have invested time and resources into internal training so that many of our staff are Xero certified, so they are in a perfect position to be able to offer proactive bookkeeping assistance and advice when required.

Over the past 12-18 months we have really been driving forward (with the support of the great team at Xero) and the number of clients we have migrated to cloud accounting has steadily grown in that time. We really see achieving Gold Partner status as an important milestone for us.

Xero has revolutionised the way we interact with our clients and we have found having access to up-to-date financial information for our clients allows us to communicate more efficiently with them and provide proactive accountancy, taxation and business advice. With Making Tax Digital for VAT on the horizon, it is an exciting time to be involved with cloud accounting and as a firm, we are delighted to be on that journey with Xero”

For more information and to see how Xero could help your business, visit our Xero page now.

For those individuals who have previously submitted ‘paper’ self assessment tax returns the deadline for the 2017/18 return is 31 October 2018. Returns submitted after that date must be submitted electronically or they will incur a minimum penalty of £100. The penalty applies even when there is no tax to pay or the tax is paid on time.
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If you would like any help with the completion of your return, please do get in touch.
Internet link: GOV.UK deadline

​The government has decided not to proceed with plans to abolish Class 2 National Insurance Contributions (NICs) from April 2019.