Income Shifting, Shifted.
March 13, 2008 by mike · Leave a Comment
Well, we had the budget yesterday. Amongst the points raised was an inferred acknowledgement by Alistair Darling that the new tax wouldn’t work - yet. “Income Shifting” legalisation has been shifted back to April 2009. Does an unpopular tax put back sound familiar? Read more
Dell XPS M1330 laptop review
March 12, 2008 by mike · 2 Comments
Although I wasn’t unhappy with my three year old Toshiba M200, it was never going to be powerful enough to handle Windows Vista and still be snappy enough for the new Visual Studio 2008 from Microsoft. Despite a very heavy day to day workload, I don’t get the chance to get out now as often as I did in my days of contracting around the UK at client sites. However, as recent sales of the new Macbook air have shown, ultra-portable machines aren’t just bought by globe trotting road warriors. Simply put, ultra portables are lighter, thinner and being designed for portability - tending to favour a tighter form factor with robust construction over features. My Toshiba M200 had the usual Toshiba robustness and reliability, but didn’t have an internal optical drive or camera. Ultra portables are nearly always premium or luxury line models, with a higher price tag for the same performance point than their larger counterparts. Read more
How to successfully prevent a CIS penalty
March 10, 2008 by mike · Leave a Comment
It’s astonishing that as an independent software vendor how many construction contractor companies prefer to contact us to ask for advice on the new Construction Industry Scheme. The hottest topic at the moment are the CIS penalties that a lot of businesses are receiving for non-compliance with the new scheme, it’s rules and it’s deadlines.
CIS penalties have been rolling for five months now, three of which we already have the statistics for. The numbers are terrifying, a total of 118,458 penalty notices were issued in a three month period from October to December. Assuming that these three months are representative, that’s a minimum of £47 million a year in fines, paid for by construction businesses like yours.
